The machine men that installed Gillard into the leadership are also sweating on the outcome given that their present, and in some cases aspiring, political careers are hanging in the balance.

Bill Shorten is positioning himself for Gillard’s inevitable removal and is the bookies’ favourite to lead Labor to the next election.

Shorten may want to reflect on the old adage that he who wields the knife never wears the crown.

Kevin Rudd is likely to play hardball, demanding that he be given a senior portfolio of his choice, namely foreign affairs, in a Labor-Green government.

If he is not accommodated, the possibility of Rudd leaving federal parliament and forcing a by-election in his seat of Griffith, under which circumstances Labor could lose, is real.

Given the 9 per cent swing against Rudd on primary votes, the thought of a contested by-election would add fuel to the

internecine war being waged within the Labor Party factions and across its state divisions.

It is easy to envisage Labor imploding, even if its increasingly irascible leader were able to convince the Governor-General that it could provide stable government at this point.

The pending NSW election, widely believed to be another Labor train wreck waiting to happen, will again expose the under-belly of the Sussex Street political machine.

The reality is that the Coalition has come from far behind almost to snatch outright victory.

Yet instability is likely to return if it fails to form a minority government and there will be internal recriminations within the Coalition if Tony Abbott fails to garner the support of the three regional independents.

One of Abbott’s secret weapons in working with the three independents is his party deputy, Julie Bishop, from Western Australia, who understands the concerns of the outlying states. Bishop has maintained cordial relations with Bob Katter and Tony Windsor through the years and is increasingly regarded as a stabilising influence within the Coalition. In politics, as in life, genuine longstanding relations count for more than fair-weather friendships that blossom opportunistically.

If the Coalition wins 73 seats, all the independents will be at the crossroads of Australian political history.

There will be an exponential increase in the weight of responsibility and the level of scrutiny of their policies, opinions and performance.

The independents will see this circumstance as an opportunity to progress their policy ideals, but opportunity comes with risk. The most obvious risk to the three regional independents will be alienating their support base should they choose to support Labor. Each represent conservative seats classified by the Australian Electoral Commission as predominantly rural.

Windsor’s seat of New England is a Federation seat held by the conservative side of politics since 1913. Irrigation and water supply issues are critical to his electorate.

The seat was held by National Party stalwart Ian Sinclair from 1963 to 1998 and long regarded as one of the jewels in the crown.

To some of his Coalition opponents, Windsor is viewed as an interloper occupying one of the Nationals’ most important seats, which in part explains the combative relationship Windsor has with his former party.

However, Windsor represents a deeply conservative electorate where the Labor candidate won only 8 per cent of the vote, and many people would be aghast if their popular local member threw in his lot with Gillard, Wayne Swan and, indirectly, Bob Brown.

The seat of Kennedy covers a huge swath of northern Queensland, from the Atherton Tableland and sugarcane country on the Pacific Ocean coast to the southern Gulf of Carpentaria, arid regions along the Northern Territory border and the Channel Country.

Katter, a highly popular independent maverick, has an agenda almost as diverse as his electorate, but the common thread is a better deal for farmers and for regional Australia.

Kennedy is also a Federation seat held comfortably by Katter since 1993, when he won it from Labor’s Rob Hulls, who held it for only one term. Bob Katter Sr held it from 1966 to 1990.

The fact Kennedy includes numerous mining towns makes it less conservative than New England, and Labor may fancy its chances at a more favourable point in the electoral cycle.

While Katter’s nearest rival from the Liberal National Party won about 26 per cent of the primary vote, the Labor vote was only a tad more than 20 per cent.

The seat of Lyne, created in 1949, was held by the Country/National Party from 1949 to 2008, when Rob Oakeshott won it in a by-election after the retirement of former Nationals leader and deputy prime minister Mark Vaile.

The loss of this seat has also grieved the Nationals, particularly given that Oakeshott was a former media adviser to Vaile and a Nationals MP in the NSW state seat of Port Macquarie.

According to the most recent census, more than 21 per cent of voters in Lyne are aged over 65 (the highest percentage of any seat). The threat to recreational fishing through Labor’s proposed marine parks appears to have alienated many Labor voters, as it garnered only 13 per cent of the primary vote.

Oakeshott is arguably the most vulnerable of the three independents, gaining 47 per cent of the primary vote against the Nationals’ 35 per cent, although he does command a comfortable 62 per cent on preferences.

Windsor and Katter are closer to the end of their parliamentary careers than the beginning and may be less concerned about a backlash against any decision that would enable Labor to form government. Oakeshott has been in federal parliament for only two years following a by-election win after Vaile resigned and would be more sensitive to the mood of his electorate.

All three independents are mindful that their decision could well define everything for which they have worked and sacrificed in their political careers.

There are many precedents, but one that may play on their minds is that of South Australian Nationals member Karlene Maywald, who agreed in 2004 to serve as minister in a minority Labor government. Voters in her electorate were initially understanding of her controversial decision because it gave her electorate political leverage.

Maywald retained her ministerial post after the 2006 election despite Labor winning a comfortable majority.

However, her decision to remain in a majority Labor government caused a huge backlash and she lost her seat at the 2010 election, with a swing against her of 20 per cent.

In the present federal situation, some conservative voters may be willing to tolerate independent representatives siding with Labor if it holds more seats than the Coalition.

Yet even then they would need to be convinced of the utter necessity of such a decision.

But if the Abbott-Bishop team gains more seats than the ALP there would be an almost overwhelming case for the conservative independents to do a deal with the Coalition.

And woe betide any independent who strays too far from the natural inclination of the conservative electoral base.

The Weekend Australian, August 28-29, 2010

Clearly, it’s in a state of flux.

As of last weekend, there are now three major parties in Australian politics and that will not change for many years to come. The Greens will be a part of government in Australia for the foreseeable future, as the Liberal Democrats are in England and so will the issues that they represent. Many pundits are saying that this will destabilise good government, but there is no logical reason to believe this. For years, democracy in Australia has been like watching two dinosaurs tearing chunks out of each other.

Our ancient Greek forefathers originally saw parliamentary debate as a way to raise the debater’s consciousness, but long ago our parliamentary system reduced this lofty ideal to a macho contest of wills where the last ego standing was the winner.

The internet, population pressure, climate change and the generally higher levels of awareness that are present in modern Western democracies are now demanding that we move on from this model. There is another fascinating phenomenon that has emerged from last week’s poll that has attracted less attention but will also shape politics in Australia in the years ahead. And that is the new minor parties and what they stand for.

Morality and lifestyle feature strongly in their agendas. In the Senate, Nick Xenophon already represents a moral perspective against gambling, while Family First’s Steve Fielding represented a moral view of a religious kind. This year’s Senate candidates included a mix of ideological parties (the Communists and the Climate Sceptics), business parties (Building Australia) and morality parties (The Secular Party).

Yet without a doubt the Australian Sex Party’s debut was the stand-out performance. Campaigning strongly against censorship and the internet filter, and advocating a national sex education curriculum to prevent the sexualisation of children, their vision for Australia ”as the most socially progressive country in the world” was supported by a number of people who were fed up with the nanny state our nation has become. Their claim to now be the ”fourth” party in Australian politics is probably justified.

The Sex Party’s Senate vote was strong enough to carry them through to the last couple of exclusions before the final Senate seat in each state was declared. In Victoria, the Sex Party’s leader, Fiona Patten, polled an equal primary vote with the Democratic Labor Party but couldn’t get the same preference flows to see her elected. In NSW, Sex Party preferences saw the Greens pick up the last Senate seat. In Queensland, Sex Party preferences to the Liberal Party, ahead of the Shooters Party, saw the Liberals pick up the last seat. In the Northern Territory, the Sex Party polled 4.5per cent of the vote and will now receive public funding. In some outback areas, they polled as high as 15 per cent.

The established lifestyle parties, like the Shooters and Fishers, didn’t do as well as Sex, but still polled enough to let governments know that lifestyle issues are each worth 60,000 votes or more around the nation. Also on 60,000 votes was the hybrid Liberal Democratic Party, which at one end supported Shooters but at the other supported Sex.

The preference swap between the LDP and the Sex Party in NSW and Victoria almost saw both of them get up. In contrast, the Secular Party’s debut lacked spirit. Notwithstanding the froth and bubble of Senate elections and the many different groups who are now having a go, increasingly one or two will rise to the surface each time and will stick around more than they have in the past. My prediction is that the Sex Party and one outdoor recreation type party will both get candidates elected to the Senate at the next federal election and that the Sex Party will win a seat in the upper house in Victoria in the state election in November.

Increasingly, we will see the Senate come to represent significant personal interest groups as well as the major political parties. The Greens may be feeling rather comfortable with their position in the Senate after last week, but as one door opens, another one closes.

The election of a Green member to the House of Representatives means they now move inexorably toward a machine politics of their own kind. They would do well to keep an eye on the horizon as the red Senate carpet is rolled out to the politics of belief, leisure and morality.

Ross Fitzgerald is Emeritus Professor of History and Politics at Griffith University, and the author of 33 books.
The Canberra Times, 27 August 2010

In the main, this four hundred page political biography of d’Alpuget’s silver- haired husband is well written and even handed. A hagiography it isn’t, which means that, as well as his achievements, a number of the PM’s mistakes are highlighted. These include the blatant ministerial mistreatment, after the 1990 election victory, which he largely engineered, of the NSW Right numbers man, Senator Graham Richardson, who as a result then became a strong supporter of Paul Keating’s long-held aim of supplanting Hawke in the Lodge.

Actually, d’Alpuget reminds us that, for all his personal and political weaknesses and venalities, Richardson was a fine, and passionately committed, Minister for the Environment, who after helicoptering “over some of the Tasmanian forests that both the Liberal and Labor parties in Tasmania were keen to log”, had been convinced by the conservationist (and later Greens senator) Bob Brown of the urgent need to protect them. By the time they arrived back in Hobart, the Senator was a convert, intending to become a warrior for Brown’s cause. In his memoir, ‘Whatever It Takes’, Richardson wrote: “That was a bad day for the logging industry in Australia but a very good one for me, the environmental movement and the Labor Party. It didn’t take too long to work out that we had a perfect convergence: what was right was also popular.”

Indeed it was Richardson who realised that, by the time of the 1990 federal election, electoral politics had to be done differently and in a particular way, namely that the votes to win were the green preferences. According to d’Alpuget, this election would “collect people’s dreams and unconscious wishes, as elections always do, but quietly, in marginal electorates. Slowly and silently, the tens of thousands of people in ‘the holding paddock’ of the marginals were about to push the (Hawke) government back into office by voting Labor second.”

d’Alpuget is spot on in her analysis of Richardson who “always promoted himself as a tough operator, which the Left took at face value, and loathed.” But, she argues, there was “a softer, genuinely empathetic side to him”, best seen when he was Minister for Health and became, in the words of the head of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Mike Codd, “passionate about Aboriginal health. Genuinely passionate. He could have achieved an awful lot in that portfolio, but he had to resign.” His resignation was due to scandal and, as d’Alpuget aptly concludes, “the shadow of scandal seemed to be Richardson’s kismet, pursuing him into his seventh decade.”

Although she cannot hide her sympathies, it seems to me that d’Alpuget is extremely insightful comparing Hawke and Keating – the self-described ‘Placido Domingo of Australian politics’. It is hard to disagree with her contention that much of the latter’s problem as a politician was his introversion. Thus while with intimates Keating was “warm, affectionate and funny, with strangers he was shy and even nervous.” d’Alpuget tellingly recounts how a journalist, walking with him through a crowd, heard Keating mutter, ‘Don’t make eye contact! Don’t look at them. Just keep going.’
By contrast, Hawke was “forever eager to meet people, to stop, shake hands, tell a joke, ruffle the hair of a child. He loved ‘the mob’ and exuded the disarming conviction that every stranger would like him.” In contrast, Hawke believed that, for many years, Keating “not only did not love the Australian people, as he, Hawke did, but actually rather despised them.”

It is a sign of the power of her analysis that d’Alpuget convinces this reviewer that Hawke’s huge strength as PM was that he deeply loved the Australian people, and believed in their goodness. At the time, this was reciprocated in spades. Thus even during the economic crisis of 1986 he was still so popular “that at one Sydney shopping centre a crowd gathered in such a surge that a Hawke staffer feared there had been an accident.” Inquiring what had happened, the staffer was simply told: ‘We’re here to see the Prime Minister!’

When asked to explain Hawke’s great election victory in 1987, the s unrivalled Labor Party chronicler and speechwriter , Graham Freudenberg, remarked that “there’s never been a prime minister who enjoyed the job, had sheer joy in it, as much as Bob. He exuded the spirit of fun and sheer zest for it.” Freudenberg explained it thus: “I don’t mean having power and the appurtenances, which of course he enjoyed, he loved. But just the sheer joy of being prime minister for THIS PEOPLE. The Australians.”

In this rivetting book on Hawke, there are the occasional inaccuracies. For example, in chapter 7 Douglas Sturkey, a long-time member of the diplomatic staff of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, who in 1990 succeeded Sir David Smith as Official Secretary to the Governor-General of Australia is wrongly referred to as Doug Sterkey.

More than balanced against this is that d’Alpuget’s biography is a genuinely fine read. Fittingly perhaps, some of the best writing in ‘HAWKE: THE PRIME MINISTER’ concerns the fundamentally ludicrous Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen for PM campaign. d’Alpuget deftly explores the way in which Joh and his ‘white shoe brigade’ played right into the PMs hands and against the fortunes of John Winston Howard who, in a later incarnation, was to rival Bob Hawke’s populist appeal.

Blanche d’Alpuget, ‘HAWKE: THE PRIME MINISTER’, Melbourne University Press, 2010, 401pp, $54.99.
By Ross Fitzgerald, Sydney Morning Herald, August 7-8, 2010, Spectrum pp 32-33.

But as William McInnes explains, history comes in all shapes and sizes, so that by 2007 “the page had turned upon the government of which Ms Bishop had been a member, presenting a new minister with the opportunity to speak about history and identity and Australia”.

Many Australians are familiar with the history of academic contention, ranging from Manning Clark and Geoffrey Blainey, to Robert Manne and Henry Reynolds, to Keith Windschuttle. Notice, though, that all these professional historians are men. But then there are other, much less academic histories. The year that Bishop made her remarks about Australia’s history, McInnes was in a TV drama, earning a dollar playing the part of our 14th prime minister, John Curtin, a Labor man through and through, who, many would argue, gave his life in service to this country.

The educated Bishop would appreciate the fact that our history was being told in the form of entertainment, broadcast across the nation, and beyond. She is, after all, the Liberal Party member for the seat of Curtin. As McInnes rightly says, “Curtin’s story belongs to us all.” Yet, as he mentions throughout the book, what we take to be history is many things – and varied.

This easy-to-read narrative of our country since World War II is complemented by scores of revealing and often highly personal black-and-white photographs. This is not surprising given the fact that The Making of Modern Australia was released to coincide with an ABC TV series of the same name. It was produced in association with the makers of the ABC documentary Ten Pound Poms and McInnes stars as the narrator.

This well-crafted book has, for me, many reverberations. Thus we are reminded that, from 1953 to the early 1970s, free morning milk was provided to primary school students to strengthen our diet. As McInnes puts it, “The milk was carried in by specially selected milk monitors, a prized position among students. Small glass milk bottles, and later small cartons, and a free drinking straw, were handed out by the monitors in time for what was termed in Queensland ‘little lunch’, or morning recess.”

In 1964, when I was 20, Donald Horne coined the ironic term “the lucky country”. He believed Australia’s wealth came “not so much from the cleverness of its citizens but from its bountiful natural resources”. Yet most Australians adopted the phrase as a term of praise.

As my father was a Democratic Labor Party voter and an avid supporter of B.A. (Bob) Santamaria, the sections dealing with the great split in the ALP in the mid-1950s and beyond are particularly fascinating. The fact is that many Australian families were rent asunder by the Labor Party/Roman Catholic split. Thus some family members continued to support the ALP while others, staunchly anti-communist, voted for the DLP and, by their preferences, helped keep the Liberal prime minister Robert Gordon Menzies in power well beyond his use-by date.

The Making of Modern Australia ends with a eulogy about Australia Day. Unfortunately, McInnes does not directly discuss the fact that January 26 is regarded by almost all Aborigines and Islanders as Invasion Day and that, for many citizens, black and white, the most appropriate date to celebrate the creation of Australia is January 1, because that was when, in 1901, our separate colonies became a single nation.

Yet for McInnes the fascinating stories of indigenous and multicultural Australians weave their way through this delightful book, as do the tales of Anglo-Celtic and European and Islamic and Vietnamese Australians. So, too, do the stories of Catholic and Protestant and Buddhist and Hindu and atheist Australians, as well as heterosexual, homosexual and transsexual Aussies. The truth is that while we may share many characteristics, we are all shaped by our own stories. As he so rightly puts it, “we come in all shapes and sizes and colours. All types. New and old, good and bad.”

Living in our island continent, in the Antipodes, in the Great South Land, it’s good (and indeed necessary) for us to listen to each other and to ask and learn about each other’s stories. When that happens, we can come to deeply share each other’s experiences and, in the process, to participate in the making of modern Australia.

Review of William McInnes, THE MAKING OF MODERN AUSTRALIA Hachette, 342pp, $35
Sydney Morning Herald, Spectrum, July 31-August 1, 2010

Speaking of photos, in our biography of Alan Reid the mystery of the ALP’s Faceless Men story and photos has been solved. There is absolutely reliable evidence that the famous 1963 photographs of what became known as the ALP’s 36 “Faceless Men” were taken by a Canberra friend of Alan Reid’s named Vladimir Paral – known as Val – who was a scientific photographer at the John Curtin Medical School.

Ross speaks at the launch of Alan ("The Red Fox") Reid

As ALAN (“THE RED FOX”) REID makes clear, Reid got Vladimir, who lived in south Canberra, not far from the Kingston Hotel, to take the photos, develop them in a dark room at the Australian National University, and they were then dispatched to Frank Packer for publication in The Daily Telegraph. Reid never revealed Paral’s role to protect him – the use of ANU property for political purposes was highly irregular – but Val Paral can be named because he is no longer in the land of the living.

Ross introduces former NSW Premier Bob Carr at the launch - Alan ("The Red Fox") Reid

This needs to be mentioned tonight, as many punters under 50 won’t know that this revelation is indeed something special!

The 1963 photos of then ALP federal leader Arthur Calwell and his ambitious deputy Gough Whitlam waiting in the dark under a lamppost outside the Kingston Hotel in Canberra, where a special ALP party conference was in session, and which Calwell & Whitlam were not allowed to attend, significantly helped the Liberals win the next two federal elections.

Ross signs books at the launch of Alan ("The Red Fox") Reid

Throughout his life, Alan Reid never disclosed who took the damning photographs, despite considerable pressure and speculation, including suggestions they had been taken by a working pressman. But that night there were no press photographers at the Hotel Kingston in Canberra.

With regard to finding the source of the photos about the Night of the Faceless Men, and Vladimir Paral’s identity, what happened is that my appeal for information about Alan Reid in THE AUSTRALIAN newspaper’s STREWTH column flushed out the story about Paral from Mr Ralph Westen of Canberra who had worked with Paral at the same dark room at the ANU in 1963. Westen saw the faceless men photos when he turned up to work on the Thursday morning.

Ross signs books at the launch of Alan ("The Red Fox") Reid

Westen responded to my appeal, and as my co-author Stephen Holt (who is here tonight) lives in Canberra he had a chat with him to verify what Westen had told me. So there we are. The riddle of who photographed the 36 unelected delegates in 1963, with Calwell & Whitlam waiting meekly outside in the dark, has been solved.

Later that year, Australia’s first televised election results featured Creighton Burns, then a lecturer in Political Science at Melbourne University, armed with a state of the art computer. The 9 Network telecast began at 8pm. A mere ten minutes later, Alan Reid, wreathed in tobacco smoke, announced, “The government’s back in.”

Guests at the launch of Alan ("The Red Fox") Reid

At 9pm, despite Burns continuing to announce that Calwell still had a good chance of winning the election, Reid reappeared in the telecast in front of a news-board, which proclaimed “MENZIES WINS”.

The wily pressman opined: “Menzies is back with a majority of about thirteen.” Confident that his man Reid had bested the machine, then and there Sir Frank Packer ordered Burns’ computer to be removed from the telecast!  And as many of us here would know, this was the very same Creighton Burns who later edited The Guardian on the Yarra i.e. The Melbourne Age – from 1981 to 1989.

Guests at the launch of Alan ("The Red Fox") Reid

A final point. Unlike much of my previous work, Stephen Holt and I have deliberately written this book, without editorialising, so that you, and you, the reader, can make up your minds about the efficacy and morality of Alan (the Red Fox) Reid as a journalist, a participant, and a person, who played such a pivotal role in twentieth century Australian history and politics.

Thank you all for coming here tonight.

Author, Professor Ross Fitzgerald’s speech at the launch of Alan (“The Red Fox”) Reid, June 8, 2010

Guests at the launch of Alan ("The Red Fox") Reid

Reid, who died in 1987 after covering 20 federal elections, is worthy of a book as he combined some of the best and worst aspects of political journalism. Not only was he a superb chronicler of the news, he was also a player, using his contacts to shape the events themselves.

At the beginning of his career, Reid was close to Labor prime ministers John Curtin and Ben Chifley, but changed sides after the Labor split of the 1950s. This is a must-read for any student of Australian politics, because it provides a well-researched, readable history of the events that ripped open the ALP and kept it out of office for 17 years. By the time Reid started working for Sir Frank Packer in 1954, he had moved to the Right, crafting his coverage to suit his boss and boost the prospects of Robert Menzies and Billy MacMahon.

The book was launched in Sydney last night by Bob Carr, who said that although Reid was a superb journalist, he was occasionally wrong: “for instance he was the last journalist to stop calling Bob Hawke a left-winger”.

“He asked some fundamentally big questions. Was the ALP fit to govern, who should rule and where should power lie? He saw that in the 1950s; Australian Labor was in a pretty wretched state.”

Reid thought people with communist backgrounds were trying to manipulate Labor leaders Doc Evatt and Arthur Calwell, Carr said — “it was a pretty ramshackle and dishevelled ALP”.

The news veteran broke many stories, but he is best remembered for his 1963 piece about Labor’s “36 Faceless Men”, a phrase that has now entered the lexicon. What gave it such impact was the photographs Reid commissioned of Calwell and his deputy, Gough Whitlam, waiting for instructions under a street lamp outside Canberra’s Hotel Kingston late at night. Inside, the machine men of Labor’s national conference were deciding a key policy issue.

“That will be history in the making, my friend,” he told the photographer, Vladimir Paral.

In his story, Reid said that the photographs indicated a “sad commentary of the decline in status of Labor’s parliamentary leadership”. The article created a furore by presenting Calwell and Whitlam as wholly dependent on decisions made by invisible forces in the party machine. It damaged Labor badly in the next two elections, before Whitlam finally succeeded in reforming the party’s structure.

The book also relates a prescient conversation between Reid and Evatt, the then leader of the opposition, in 1955. They were discussing the consequences of the ALP split, which led to the formation of the Catholic-dominated DLP.

Evatt: “I’ll tell you something, Alan, for every Catholic vote I’ll lose I will get two Protestant votes.”

Reid: “You are out of your cotton-picking mind, Doc. The Church of England mob belong with the Protestant party which is the Menzies party; they will applaud you but they won’t shift. You have all the non-conformists that Labor ever is liable to pick up, so all that is going to happen is that you’re going to lose the Catholic vote.”

Press gallery doyen Laurie Oakes, in the foreword to the book, says “it is not possible to write the political history of Australia without including a section on Alan Reid”:

“Nor is it possible to discuss the evolution of political journalism in this country sensibly without an examination of Reid’s methods, motives and influence.”

Later in the book, the authors relate an exchange between Reid and a group of young reporters on the day of Whitlam’s dismissal in 1975.

“What do you think of this?”, they asked the 61-year-old newsman. “It’s a great story,” he replied.

“You wouldn’t have said that if it happened to Menzies,” one tearfully retorted. Reid said: “I’d say it if it happened to my own mother — it’s a great story.”

As is this book.

By Margot Saville, www.crikey.com.au

True, if you think of teaching and research as a simple commodity, such as wheat or coal, a commodity to be traded in competitive markets.

This is largely how tertiary education has been treated by recent Coalition and Labor governments. Funding cuts have forced universities to behave like big businesses, where vice-chancellors are now little more than overpaid chief executives who spend virtually all their time fund-raising.

But there are never enough funds, particularly for regional universities, which are so important to local communities and which can be vital in decentralising population away from our increasingly congested metropolitan hubs.

In regional Australia, universities add much-needed diversity and opportunity, as well as being important regional employers. They change the value mix.

In the regions they provide an opportunity to integrate academic knowledge and understanding with regional skills, knowledge and understanding. This integration enriches our regional communities, which in turn enrich each state in the commonwealth.

Regional universities enable regional Australia to be more than a passive receiver of teaching and research. It is the very give and take that ought to lie at the heart of education, sharing ideas to generate the growth of new knowledge and understanding and its practical application.

Regional universities are part of the balance that ensures that regional Australia is not serviced by capital city Australia. They help to ensure that regional Australia is a full and active participant in our nation.

For many, this quite rightly means combining with TAFE to be “dual sector” universities supporting both trade and professional education needed for vibrant regional economies.

Sadly all this opportunity for regional universities to energise a dynamic regional Australia is lost when universities are treated as businesses, with faculties and departments seen as key profit centres.

This focus on marketing, re-branding, customer service, business cases, export awards and the like, so beloved by the Howard government, has to date been accepted holus bolus by the Rudd Labor government.

In spite of her intelligence, the overloaded Julia Gillard, Minister for Education, Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, Minister for Social Inclusion and Deputy Prime Minister, has largely failed to act.

Most critically, in regional Australia she has yet to give local universities the support that links education, employment and workplace change in order to meet the twin challenges of access and diversity that are at the core of our rapidly evolving regions.

This is critical because regional Australia is home to the farm and the quarry: the twin engines that have done most of the work to give Australia a remarkably smooth ride through the global financial crisis.

But the farm and the quarry are workplaces undergoing rapid change, a transformation which, to be effective, requires an ability to rethink and reshape. Such innovation is a capability inherent in higher education and research.

It is a vital part of the hardiness required by regional Australia whose wellbeing requires the capacity to thrive as form and substance change, sometimes exponentially.

Now gaining thicker and thicker coats of dust, the Denise Bradley Report into higher education in 2008 largely put regional universities to one side. Gillard, in spite of her record as a champion of the underprivileged, has not challenged this. Some would say, why should she when most federal seats are in the capital city heartlands where the big universities live?

It is a blind spot of a Melbourne-educated lawyer which could blight both Gillard’s prospects and the future of our regions. They need inclusion in the upcoming election debate, a debate at present dominated by arguments about who is best to manage the economy and enlivened by shouts about who is best to keep refugees out.

This is especially the case as the recent federal budget largely ignored higher education and, in so doing, missed the chance to revitalise and re-position regional universities as key engines for change.

This is a reminder to our Deputy Prime Minister that regional Australia requires her attention. And that attending to regional universities would be a good place to start.

On the other hand, Gillard could leave it to the maverick MP Bob Katter from the vast north Queensland seat of Kennedy and his fellow independents to try to make the running about funding the regions and especially our neglected regional universities. But Gillard shouldn’t leave it too late, particularly if the next federal election is as close a run thing as the Tasmanian and South Australian state elections.

Then there wouldn’t be time to woo the independents with promises to return more of the tax dollars from the farm and the quarry to regional Australia.

Now is the time to drive social inclusion and workplace change by properly funding cash-strapped regional universities so that they can support the constituencies of the farm and the quarry with much valued teaching and research.

If the farm and the quarry engines are not sustained, this year may see Labor lose power federally and a double dip recession engulf those big-city electorates and our regions as well.

But if Julia and Kevin are truly smart, then supporting regional Australia and their higher education institutions may be just the way to make effective use of what is left of their great, big, new, resource “super-profits” tax.

The Weekend Australian, June 5-6, 2010

It was the late 1950s and Reid, by then the most influential figure in the Canberra press gallery, had already twice failed at fiction. He had written a 100,000-word novel about the crucifixion of Christ. It was a tale of politics, not religion, and publishers in London rejected it as too controversial.

Then Reid read The Man from Laramie in The Saturday Evening Post and decided to write an “Australian western” set in the Snowy Mountains, one of his favourite bush places. He wrote 50,000 words in a fortnight and sent them to the Post. Rejected again: unfamiliar setting, strange idiom, too Australian.

So here was Reid, three years after the Labor split, hunched over a typewriter, a roll-your-own dangling from his lips, a cup of black tea within reach, tapping out a novel in which H. V. Evatt, the Labor opposition leader, and B. A. Santamaria, the Catholic activist and anti-communist, appear as Kaye Seborjar (a play on Cesare Borgia) and Carr Domenico respectively. Seborjar is cranky, untrustworthy and ambitious to the point of megalomania. Domenico hides fascist sympathies behind “the surface mildness of an oriental sage”. Just about everyone in the novel is unlovely. Politics, Reid is saying, is grubby and ignoble and idealists are mugs.

But, for our purposes, the most interesting character in the manuscript is a 40-year-old political insider called Macker Kalley (a play on Machiavelli). He enjoys reading and going bush. He is drawn to plots and intrigues and likes to think he influences the course of events. He sees politics with a pitiless eye:

In the final analysis, energy, tenacity, ambition and, above all, luck were more rewarding political attributes than integrity, ability or originality of mind . . . All politicians are bastards, but some are bigger bastards than others.

Kalley tries to quarantine his wife and daughter from this world. The calling is, by definition, degenerate.

This novel didn’t get published either (it got to final proofs before fears of defamation actions arose) and maybe this was just as well. Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt, the authors of this biography of Reid, have read the manuscript, which is in the National Library of Australia. The characters, they write, are wooden and the dialogue flat. There is not “a robust sense of background or a loving re-creation of detail”, just “a lifeless hothouse air”. But the question that arises is this: is Macker Kalley the alter ego of Alan Reid?

Reid, who died in 1987 after covering 20 federal elections, lives on as one of the grand figures of the Canberra press gallery. Those of us who saw him towards the end of his career remember a small and wiry man in a rumpled suit, his red hair (hence the nickname “the Red Fox”) thinning and thatched with grey. He was invariably sucking on a cigarette and staring out with hard eyes that narrowed under bristling eyebrows and seemed to be taking the measure of everyone around him. He was kind to newcomers to the gallery, free with advice and wisdom, but, for all that, they probably saw him as the past rather than the future.

He was almost a caricature of the blokey reporter before the era of media studies and live crosses. John Gorton (a jaundiced witness, it should be said) wrote that Reid wore an expression of perpetual cynicism and spoke from the corner of his mouth. “One expects momentarily to be nudged in the ribs with a confidential elbow and given a hot tip for the 3.30 at Randwick.”

Few broke more big stories than Reid. He exposed the offstage manoeuvrings of Santamaria that led to the Labor split of 1955, a great festering wound that helped keep Labor out of office for the next 17 years. In 1963, Reid had the wit to summon a photographer to Canberra’s Hotel Kingston to capture Arthur Calwell, the leader of the opposition, and Gough Whitlam, his deputy, waiting under a street lamp late at night while inside the 36 machine men of the national conference, most of them unknown to the electorate, debated the conditions under which Labor might allow an American base to operate in Australia.

Calwell and Whitlam looked like lackeys waiting for their orders, largely because, in this instance, they were. Thus were born the “36 faceless men”, and Robert Menzies, the prime minister, would trot them out with the aplomb of a police inspector staging a line-up.

Reid also broke many of the stories that led to Gorton’s fall as prime minister. There were so many scoops in a career that took in 14 prime ministers. Reid had better contacts than the other Canberra journalists. He had the instincts of a bloodhound, which was right enough because he thought he was covering a blood sport. Other reporters had pencils in their pockets; Reid carried a gambrel as well, and every now and then politicians wandered up and impaled themselves on it. Sometimes he knew more about what was going on than cabinet ministers. Everyone felt they had to talk to him.

Late in this book the authors tell of an exchange on the day John Kerr sacked the Whitlam government in 1975. Reid, still working but no longer the eminence he had once been, ran into a group of younger reporters, some with tears in their eyes.

Reporters: What do you think of this?

Reid: It’s a great story.

Reporters: You wouldn’t have said that if it had happened to Menzies.

Reid: I’d say it if it happened to my own mother — it’s a great story.

It was the perfect answer, a proper journalist’s answer. Get the story. Stay detached. Weep, if you need to, when you get home.

So, if we stop here, the subtitle of this book, Pressman Par Excellence, stands up well. Reid was a supreme example of the energetic newsman, a role model, to use a silly phrase. But we can’t stop here because it is only half the story, the sunny bit, the fluffy stuff of mythology.

Reid was also a political player, much more so than the reporters weeping for Whitlam when they should have been chasing the story. He was a plotter and a schemer who had read too much Machiavelli, a man who not only reported conspiracies but also fired them up like a frenzied stoker on a tramp steamer. He was in love with intrigue and the intrigues he uncovered mostly pleased his boss, Frank Packer, proprietor of The Daily Telegraph and the fledgling Nine Network.

Packer saw the existence of the Labor Party as a threat to the propertied classes, so Reid’s stories on Santamaria and the 36 faceless men came as manna. Packer wanted Billy McMahon as prime minister, probably because he knew he could manipulate him, and Reid helped bring this about. Reid, an intelligent man, must have known that McMahon, a leaker with the leadership qualities of a small insect, was unfit to be prime minister, but he went along with the boss.

Reid wasn’t simply another journalist in the gallery, another seeker of truths. He was also there to look after Packer’s corporate interests which, one is entitled to assume, made him a seeker of favours. Trying to reconcile these two roles is the sort of exercise that gives cynicism a bad name.

Pressman par excellence? One thinks not, good as Reid was at sniffing out a story. Still, it is this dark side that, when set alongside Reid’s front-page triumphs, makes him a hopelessly interesting subject for biography.

And, in fairness to the authors, they never seek to hide or justify Reid’s double life. They are on to it on the opening page with a quotation from Laurie Oakes of the Nine Network at a Walkley ceremony more than a decade ago:

If you want to talk about the medium being a participant, when I was first posted to Canberra about 30 years ago, I suppose Alan Reid was the king. And Reidy was also the champion of being a participant in politics. He was much more a player than a journalist. He used to spend more time advising politicians than reporting on them.

Oakes, as fine a reporter as the gallery has produced, pens a stylish foreword to this book. While he clearly has affection for Reid the man and respect for Reid the news breaker, he acknowledges the dark side as well. Oakes joined the press gallery 40 years ago. “I thought then, and still do, that Reid combined the best and some of the worst aspects of political journalism.” And elsewhere: “While Reid’s growing disapproval of Gorton was genuine enough, his role in the campaign to install McMahon in the Lodge was squarely in line with the Packer agenda and it went well beyond mere journalism.”

Reid’s life makes for good biography because, as they say in Hollywood, there is a dramatic character arc, and the authors have brought this out well. Reid, born in Britain in 1914, grew up in poverty in non-gentrified Paddington. He left school after obtaining his leaving certificate and, shades of Billy Hughes, worked at odd jobs in outback NSW and Queensland before being hired by Robert Clyde Packer (father of Frank) as a copy boy on the Sydney Sun.

Reid did the stock exchange quotes, reported the fish and produce markets and had a stint captioning photographs, as punishment for a drunken episode. He was already a Labor man, having joined the party after leaving school. Sent to Canberra in 1937, he became an admirer of John Curtin and Ben Chifley. Chifley would remain his favourite prime minister.

Reid was a true believer and Chifley at one point suggested he run for parliament. Reid’s best contacts were with Labor, which he saw as the serious player. As he wrote later, Liberals thought of politics as an amateur game for gentlemen, whereas Laborites saw it as “a tough professional fight for existence”. There may still be truth in this observation.

Reid in 1954 moved to Frank Packer’s Daily Telegraph. That was the year when the overture to the Labor split set off sectarian hatreds similar to those that marked the conscription debates of 1916 and 1917. Reid was on his way to becoming the great news breaker. He was kicked out of the Labor Party in 1957, but its numbers men kept leaking to him and he kept uncovering feuds and plots. Labor, as the authors say, was fighting for its soul. Reid had grabbed the best seat at ringside. Between rounds he rushed from one corner to the other to rasp out advice and occasionally climbed into the ring himself.

Here was a world now long gone. The class war was alive. Unionists called each other “comrade” and trades hall council meetings were sometimes adjourned to the nearest pub. Capitalists harrumphed in their clubs. Strikes were common and often nasty. Trotskyites, groupers and Maoists skirmished around the edges of the Labor Party.

The Cold War was alive, too: spies and defections and questions of loyalty. Menzies worked this war well and Evatt didn’t. Older reporters, Reid included, wore hats, thumped rickety typewriters and could still get stories into their papers at midnight. There was a pecking order in the Canberra press gallery. The veterans set the agenda and sometimes exchanged carbon copies of stories.

Then Reid’s world began to change. Younger reporters arrived: Oakes, Allan Barnes, Alan Ramsey, Paul Kelly, Michelle Grattan and others. They did things their way. Whitlam and Bob Hawke found new constituencies for Labor among the middle classes. Schoolteachers became as important as shop stewards; doctors’ wives would come later.

Reid thought Whitlam was favouring an “articulate avant garde”. He was bothered, too, by the rise of multiculturalism and the Aboriginal land rights movement. It all seemed a long way from shearers’ strikes and unity tickets.

Packer sold The Daily Telegraph, Reid’s main outlet, in 1972 and died two years later. Reid got on well with Kerry, Frank’s son, but Kerry, whatever his personal beliefs, was a pragmatist. He knew he could make money under a Labor government just as easily as under the Liberals. There was no need to keep attacking Labor, as his father had, simply because it was Labor. Reid, on the other hand, was still seeing tiny fissures in the Labor monolith and thinking they might be cracks.

Fitzgerald and Holt have given us a biography that reads better than most Australian political tracts. Their research is impressive. They strive to be fair and never lapse into hagiography. The book picks up pace nicely after its opening chapters, where the authors seem less sure of their material than later in the narrative and are inclined to generalisations and the odd lazy sentence.

But the best thing about this book is the light it shines on murky places. It tells us much about how the Canberra gallery works, and not just back then, because mischief making did not end with the Reid era. It reminds us that journalism can be as morally hazardous as politics and that journalists can get too close to their sources.

Above all, it shows us what happens when journalists become players.

Not long before Reid died, a local priest called on him offering spiritual consolations. “I’d be a hypocrite if I accepted them,” Reid told him. “But remember this, Father, keep your running shoes on, because you might get an important call and there’ll be a swift deathbed repentance. I’m a great believer in each way betting.”

Tired and shrunken, he could still do the numbers. Reid was a brilliant getter of stories and he was also Svengali. That is the triumph and the tragedy of his journalistic life. In the end, he was out of time and place, but we should not be too judgemental. It will happen to all who play at journalism, especially those of us who look back fondly on smoky newsrooms and still hear the clatter of linotype machines.

By Les Carlyon The Australian Literary Review, June 2, 2010
Alan “The Red Fox” Reid: Pressman Par Excellence, by By Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt, New South, 384pp, $49.95 (HB)

The Australian, May 31, 2010

Alan 'The Red Fox' Reid book cover

THE Canberra press gallery was once prowled by political reporters said to be more influential than many Ministers.

The biggest scoop, by one of the most fearsome in their ranks, Alan Reid, is chronicled in a new book.

In the autumn of 1963 the major national political issue in Australia was the Labor Party’s response to the Menzies government’s new security agreement with the United States, under which a communications station to control Polaris nuclear-armed submarines was to be established at North West Cape (also known as Exmouth Gulf) in Western Australia.

The agreement provoked clamorous opposition. A resolution from Labor’s WA state branch opposed “any base being built in Australia that could be used for the manufacture, firing or control of any nuclear missile or vehicle capable of carrying nuclear missiles”.

Some federal members began to treat the WA resolution as official party policy, but Labor’s federal opposition leader Arthur Calwell and deputy leader Gough Whitlam felt that support for the base was not in conflict with party policy provided the base was subject to joint control.

Veteran Canberra gallery journalist Alan Reid, then of Sydney-based media owner Sir Frank Packer’s The Daily Telegraph, sensed that a great story was in the offing. It was surely a sign of instability and weakness that Calwell, worried about the attitude of NSW federal MP Tom Uren and other leftists, twice sought a favourable ruling on North West Cape from the ALP federal executive.

He could not, Reid reported, “take a trick”; the executive referred the issue to the party’s federal conference, where the left faction, with the support of the West Australian, Victorian and Queensland branches and a couple of Tasmanian delegates, had “a clear-cut majority” of the 36 delegates (six from each state). A special federal conference, the first since Labor prime minister John Curtin’s conscription initiative in 1942, was called for March to determine the issue.

The federal executive, in calling the special conference, directed the relevant conference committee to prepare a policy report on North West Cape. The committee produced a majority report that accepted the American base provided certain conditions were met. A minority report opposed the base under any circumstances.

Relying on an inside source, whom Uren later suggested was NSW MP and former Packer journalist Les Haylen, Reid wrote in The Daily Telegraph that the Left could count on having 17 to 19 votes in the 36-member conference. This was not a clear-cut majority at all.

The conference assembled at Canberra’s Hotel Kingston on Monday, March 17, 1963, and ran through the next couple of days before coming to a head in the wee hours of Thursday morning.

At 8pm on that endless Wednesday night, Reid could see that “delegates were still running around” with no decision, compromise or otherwise, having been reached. Calwell and Whitlam, who had both addressed the conference, were in their offices at Parliament House waiting for a telephone call to tell them of the conference’s decision.

Half an hour later the parliamentary leadership began ringing the Hotel Kingston to see how things were going. The delegates had voted 21 to 15 against a complete ban, and the conference was now deadlocked at 18 votes each as left-wing and right-wing negotiators tried to formulate a resolution that would get up.

The issue was determined at 1.45am by 19 votes to 17 after a Queensland delegate (state opposition leader John “Jack” Duggan) abandoned the Left and voted for a resolution which the delegates from NSW, South Australia and Tasmania supported, under which the conference accepted the US base subject to joint controls.

Uren treated this decision as a historic defeat for the Left. The key paragraph amid a forest of “ifs” was: “A defence radio communication centre capable of communicating with submarines operated by an ally in Australia would not be inconsistent with Labor policy.”

In the lead-up to the final vote Reid and his fellow pressmen were gathered in the foyer of the Hotel Kingston. As things stood, he realised that he did not have a memorable news story on his hands. Labor, he knew, would have plenty of time to recover from this display of disunity and indecision, the next federal election not being due until the end of 1964.

The decision to accept the base would have removed a major point of difference between the Opposition and the Coalition. Labor now had a breathing space to turn the focus of attention back on to the more favourable battleground of domestic issues.

Even at midnight Reid remained unflustered. He knew he still had time to conjure up a good news story given that his journalistic working day could often last until 3am. As Wednesday ticked over into Thursday he asked a colleague (who can tentatively be identified as the seemingly ever-present John Bennetts of The Age) to see what was happening outside in the darkened environs of the Hotel Kingston.

A report came back to the effect that Calwell and Whitlam had just arrived from Parliament House. This piece of information caused Reid to have a brainwave. Experience told him that a picture was worth a thousand words. Were the two loitering Labor leaders, he hoped, doing something that might make an arresting or embarrassing photograph? As luck would have it, they were.

Calwell and Whitlam could be seen outside the Hotel Kingston conferring with West Australian-based powerbroker Joe Chamberlain and other conference identities under a street lamp.

Delegates were ducking out of the hotel to tell them of the latest developments as the final decision was about to be made. An inspired Reid instantly envisaged a graphic take on the scene: “Almost as though they were emphasising their exclusion from the conference, then debating a subject on which it could legitimately be argued Australia’s future could depend in the event of a major war, they stood forlornly under a street lamp. Conference delegates emerged from the hotel to confer with them almost patronisingly.”

A scoop would be plucked, Prospero-like, from the jaws of frustration if the moment could be captured in a photograph. Reid went into full poker-playing mode. Never was the Red Fox, as he was known, more vulpine than on this night. After waiting to ensure that the other pressmen with him did not know what he was up to, he went to a nearby phone and asked for a newspaper photographer to be sent over. Although told that no photojournalist was available, Reid’s run of luck continued, as he later revealed in oral history.

After making his fruitless phone call Reid suddenly discovered, to his great relief, that among the people who had come to the Hotel Kingston to have a squiz at the proceedings was someone who was both a highly skilled photographer and a friend, or at least the friend of a friend, their familiarity springing from the fact they were both enthusiastic anglers who loved to go fishing for trout at the famed Blue Water Hole at the head of the Goodradigbee River.

Reid promptly asked this saviour — since identified as Vladimir Paral, a senior scientific photographer at the John Curtin School of Medical Research — to rush home and get his equipment and take as many photographs of Calwell and Whitlam as he could. Reid told Paral that he need not worry if the shots did not glamorise the subjects.

The more disordered and confused people appeared to be in the photos the better, for Reid’s purposes. In some shots Paral only got the backs of the heads of the party insiders Whitlam or Calwell were talking to. Such was the way in which the photographic images of the “faceless men” who ran the Labor Party were created.

A few hours later the pressman and the photographer met up in King’s Hall, where Paral’s unflattering photographs, which had been developed in a darkroom at the John Curtin School, were handed over and dispatched to Sydney by the first flight out of Canberra.

The midnight photographs accompanied Reid’s final story on the ALP conference in Friday’s edition of The Daily Telegraph and were presented as indicating “a sad commentary of the decline in status of Labor’s parliamentary leadership”. Calwell and Whitlam, the Telegraph’s story lamented, had been forced to wait in the darkness outside the Hotel Kingston as the federal conference delegates — 36 “virtually unknown men” — decided Labor policy on the proposed US communications base. One of the photographs showed Calwell and his speechwriter, Graham Freudenberg, huddled with Labor’s lord mayor Clem Jones of Brisbane, pleading with him (he was a delegate) to oppose the call for a complete ban on the base. Another picture showed Calwell and Whitlam earnestly buttonholing Frank Waters, another Queensland delegate.

In a third photograph Calwell was seen conferring with Joe Chamberlain. The West Australian still believed he had the backing of 18 of the 36 delegates to go for broke and block approval of the base, which would have forced Calwell, in Reid’s view, to “defend the indefensible”.

A worried-looking Duggan provided the denouement in Reid’s version of the Bayeux Tapestry. After being photographed with Whitlam and Calwell, Duggan returned to the conference room where, after some uncertainty, he finally voted with right-wing delegates to get the diluted resolution of support through.

The intention was to provide “an electoral face-saver for himself and for Mr Calwell”, but Reid was not convinced: “[A]fter the vote left wingers say openly in the hotel lounge: ‘You can forget Duggan after this — he’ll be finished as parliamentary leader in Queensland within six months. [Duggan in fact lasted until 1966.]‘ In this manner federal Labor leadership was publicly humiliated. The conference has demonstrated that it regards the federal parliamentary Labor leader not as an alternative prime minister, a leader and an adviser but as a lackey.”

The substance of the policy adopted at the Hotel Kingston was no longer the immediate concern; what Reid had succeeded in doing was to present Calwell and Whitlam, whose policy had got up at the conference, as wholly dependent on decisions made by invisible forces in the party machine. The result was, in the opinion of a Whitlam aide, “a publicity disaster”. Reid’s story was directed against Calwell and Whitlam. Demonising the organisational wing of the party was merely a means to this end. Labor’s machine men had been among Reid’s most reliable sources of political information for years.

The focus on Labor’s machine men intensified as Menzies, bent on reversing the Coalition losses of the 1961 election, searched for issues on which he could fight an early election. Initially the alliance with the US was the key point of differentiation, but as 1963 progressed it was Labor’s division on whether to support state aid for Catholic schools that was increasingly mined as an issue.

Here was a domestic issue that could be put to good use. Divisive sectarianism was still alive. Labor’s fear of Catholic political activist Bob Santamaria, unmodified since the party split of the 1950s over communist influence in the ALP, made it wary of supporting state aid. Reid and the Telegraph were caught up in the action as the parties jostled for advantage.

When covering the 1963 NSW ALP conference, Reid had been impressed by a policy document that proposed state aid for libraries and science blocks. It was not adopted, but Reid did not forget it. He mentioned the document to Menzies, who asked for a copy.

On October 15 Menzies announced that the nation would go the polls in an early election November 30 to elect a new House of Representatives. This statement was followed by a rare Menzies press conference.

In reporting this event Reid waxed lyrical about the prime minister’s “aplomb and gusto”.

The suggestion of a possible post-election decision to retire or go to the House of Lords, diffidently raised by pressmen, was greeted with “withering cheerful scorn”. [Menzies did retire as PM in the next term, in early 1966.] A gruelling election campaign was being embraced with “the casual off-handedness of a Sydneysider talking about a Manly ferry trip”. It was clear, Reid wrote, that the prime minister had the zest to carry out his demanding job.

But as a result of an “imaginative and appealing” policy speech, Calwell and his colleagues, Reid thought, had for a brief moment “a real chance of becoming the next government of Australia”.

The tide turned once Menzies delivered his policy speech on November 12, 1963. After relating his government’s contribution to economic growth, Menzies asked his television and radio audience the following loaded questions: “In the very heyday of our progress, the Australian Labor Party asks you to dismiss us; to commit the national fortunes to the hands of its members of parliament and the famous outside body, 36 ‘faceless men’, whose qualifications are unknown, who have no elected responsibility to you. Do you feel tempted? Why?”

Reid, powerfully aided by Paral’s back-of-the-head shots of conference delegates, had originally written about the “virtually unknown men” and their role at the 1963 special conference.

He had posited a void, which Menzies had filled up with scary imagery. The Menzies formulation of “36 faceless men” reinforced the idea in the mind of a fearful electorate. The notion was milked for all it was worth.

A Liberal Party election leaflet featured one of Reid’s photographs of Calwell waiting outside the Hotel Kingston. It was a worrying day, the leaflet said, when “national leadership on great affairs is surrendered to unknown outsiders bitterly fighting with one another about action on national survival”.

Labor’s faceless men rejected state aid for Catholic schools, so Menzies pledged pound stg. 5 million for science blocks for private as well as state schools.

As polling day drew nearer Reid made much of a pledge made by Calwell to abolish preferential voting. He suggested that such an action, by preventing the Liberal and Country [now Nationals] parties from pooling their votes, “would mean that a federal Labor government once in power would continue in office almost indefinitely”.

Within a few days the need for scare tactics was obviated, in tragic circumstances. The assassination of president John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, confirmed the electorate’s determination to steer clear of political change at a time of intense insecurity.

On the following weekend, as voters trooped to the polls, media coverage of an Australian election reached a new technological level. Frank Packer, eager to turn the event into the nation’s first televised election night, devoted the manpower and technical resources of TCN9 and its Melbourne associate, GTV9, to an election night telecast covering Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Newcastle and Wollongong.

The linchpin was the advent of an interstate coaxial cable which, in those landline-only days of local TV, linked television coverage in Melbourne and Sydney with the Canberra tally-room, where the Packer team featured psephologist Creighton Burns, who had a state-of-the-art computer at his disposal to process the results.

Election night kicked off at 8pm, when Brian Henderson in Sydney introduced viewers to “the first network election coverage”. Behind the scenes an epic race between man and machine was under way. At 8.10pm the news director at the Telegraph called the master control room to say that “Alan Reid’s got something to say”. There were few results on the tally board and the computer had yet to enlighten anyone about anything when the control room cut to the Telegraph newsroom, prompted by the sight on the monitor of Reid’s worldly wise face wreathed in cigarette smoke. “The government’s back in, and we’re saying so in the edition that’s going out now,” the pressman announced.

At about 9pm Reid reappeared in the telecast, standing in front of a news board that proclaimed “Menzies Wins”. “Menzies is back with a majority of about 13,” he said. It was soon clear that Reid had bested the computer, and Packer ordered the computer to be removed from the presentation after Burns, despite Reid’s correctness by then being in no doubt, continued to announce that Calwell still had a good chance of winning the election.

The 1963 election had proven to be a highly successful referendum directed against Labor’s faceless men. The process of winding back the power of the faceless men gathered pace over the rest of the decade. Labor’s modernising wing marketed the structural reforms, which came into effect in 1967, as “the greatest change in the framework of our party on a national scale” since the formation of the federal executive in 1915. Whitlam, elected Labor leader in 1967, was proud to announce that the party had “now demolished the cry of the 36 faceless men”.

But despite the rhetoric, Labor’s faceless men lived on. They were not extinguished; their position was merely modified.

The parliamentary leadership, state and federal, was rudely grafted on to the federal conference, whose composition otherwise remained exactly the same.

The six state conferences continued to pick six national conference delegates and two delegates to the national executive. The faceless men, while no longer the sole controllers of the party organisation, were still a part of it.

Their influence was further sustained by factional ties between them and individual members of Labor’s parliamentary leadership group. Further reform, involving restructuring of various dysfunctional state branches of the party, was required to make the organisation of the ALP truly seem less exclusive and anachronistic.

The faceless men story of 1963 showed that a working journalist could make an impact on national affairs without having to move up the hierarchy to the level of an editor or senior manager.

Reid was a force to be reckoned with, but he was keen to give the impression power had not gone to his head.

Management, he insisted in a rare public address in 1965, determined what journalists did and managers, for the most part, did what the private owners of the Australian press told them to do.

Pressmen such as himself were humble hewers of information. Laborites and unionists who were at the receiving end of Reid’s journalism in Packer-owned publications refused to accept this self-deprecation.

This is an edited extract from Alan “The Red Fox” Reid: Pressman Par Excellence, by Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt, to be published next week by New South, $49.95.

Ross Fitzgerald is a writer, broadcaster, historian and political commentator who writes a regular column for Inquirer. He has published 33 books, most recently My Name is Ross: An Alcoholic’s Journey.

Stephen Holt is a Canberra-based historian and speech-writer. His biography of Manning Clark was published by Allen & Unwin in 1999. As a policy officer, he has drafted speeches and letters for past and present ministers, including Joe Hockey and Julia Gillard.

* * *

Packer ‘stooge’ was the ultimate insider
Ross Fitzgerald

“ALAN Reid was a famous journalist who worked in Canberra’s parliamentary press gallery, mostly for the then Frank Packer-owned The Daily Telegraph, for 50 years until he retired in the 1980s.”

The author of this summary of Reid’s long career was another famed political journalist, Laurie Oakes, writing in his nationally circulated column in the winter of 2008. A decade earlier, when accepting one of Australian journalism’s Walkley Awards (for journalistic leadership), Oakes fleshed out Reid’s historical significance for the benefit of his peers at the gala ceremony: “If you want to talk about the medium being a participant, when I was first posted to Canberra — about 30 years ago, I suppose — Alan Reid was the king. And Reidy was also the champion of being a participant in politics. He was much more a player than a journalist. He used to spend more time advising politicians than reporting on them.”

Reid died more than 20 years ago, on September 1, 1987, to be precise, but his presence, on the strength of Oakes’s comments, persists in the folk memory of his journalistic successors. Reid is still remembered as well by the politicians whom journalists write about, if we are to judge by a tantalising entry in Mark Latham’s notorious political diary: “[Paul] Keating once told caucus to be cautious with

this bloke [journalist and Inquirer columnist Mike Steketee] — he’s a protege of the Packer stooge and infamous Labor hater Alan Reid.”

For much of Reid’s career it was hard to tell where a straight reporting of events ended and a behind-the-scenes involvement in politics began. The Depression politicised him for life. Mass unemployment led him to support the Australian Labor Party as emboldened by its NSW leader Jack Lang. Reid’s Langite connections eased his entry into the inner ranks of political journalism.

To sustain his career after Lang’s appeal weakened, Reid, in the era of John Curtin and Ben Chifley, made new contacts, notably ALP numbers man Pat Kennelly. He liked being close to power. It was good to know key political players and to be able to directly scrutinise their thoughts and deeds.

He had entree to party leaders and senior figures in both the Labor and non-Labor side of politics. He conversed with Curtin and was close to Chifley. In later years he counselled Robert Menzies and Harold Holt on how to win elections. He sought to boost Bob Hawke’s career in the 1970s by championing him as the nemesis of the Labor Left. Near the end of his career, in the 80s, he inadvertently inspired Malcolm Fraser to set up Frank Costigan’s royal commission into the affairs of the Ships’ Painters and Dockers Union, an inquiry that took on a life of its own, as Fraser and his treasurer John Howard (a keen student of Reid’s writing) found, to their cost.

Reid traded in information as he worked to construct a richer and wider understanding of what was going on. He needed to keep the trust of his sources and he did so by treating the journalistic code of confidentiality as sacrosanct. Politicians from all parties could swap stories with him in the knowledge that they would never be identified. At times Reid’s stories were tweaked to disguise or conceal the identity of the people who provided him with information.

Reid’s standing as an insider was greatly enhanced because he was linked to the Packer media empire. But any empire, if it is to last, needs to attract the support of able and proficient retainers. For such retainers, this need creates scope for autonomy and, in the case of an outstanding journalist such as Reid, freedom of expression. Reid’s professionalism and discretion — qualities evident for years before he joined Packer — were vital in allowing him to maintain his impressive network of contacts.

Through them he had access to the inner workings of the nation’s politics and government.

Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt, The Weekend Australian, May 29-30, 2010

Alan “The Red Fox” Reid: Pressman Par Excellence, by By Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt, New South, 384pp, $49.95 (HB)