Although her personal commitment to the Liberal cause never faltered, our mother worried that politics would divide Bob from the rest of the family. Sometimes she asked that we steer clear of too many political discussions when all of us were together. Mum was especially anxious about our traditional family gathering on Christmas night, 1975. Bob, by then a staunch Labor man, was in high dudgeon about the dismissal of the Whitlam Government, and had been shattered by the electoral rout of his party. To cap it all, his young brother had just been made a minister by the dreaded Malcolm Fraser. It was a bit tense, but we made it.
Both of us were determined not to allow our political differences to come between us and, although we had plenty of intense arguments, particularly over the 1975 dismissal of Whitlam, this did not happen. By contrast Wal and Stan, my other brothers, who had always been Liberal followers, increased their active involvement and support, particularly after I entered parliament. Wal had been an enthusiastic branch office-bearer for years, and Stan would help out in a variety of ways, including with fund-raising.
In the 33 years that I was in parliament, including some of those difficult opposition years, Wal and Stan were loyal and consistent backers. They were the ultimate in true believers. And it was not just the loyalty that I valued. As a small businessman for much of his working life, Wal was a constant window into a world so important to the Liberal Party’s base of support. Stan was a senior partner for many years in one of Australia’s largest legal firms (Mallesons) and his professional activities gave him insights into the thinking of corporate Australia. In different ways they were both great sources of counsel and advice.
During the years that I was Prime Minister, Wal, Stan and their families joined Janette, me and our children in election-night celebrations (commiserations on one occasion), as well as other landmark events. Naturally Bob did not. He did, however, find personal ways of marking my success, consistent with his ongoing Labor convictions. When I was sworn in as Prime Minister on 11 March 1996, Bob came to the first part of the ceremony, when I took my oath of office alongside Tim Fischer as Deputy Prime Minister. Bob gave the rest a miss; that involved the swearing in of the remainder of the new Government. ‘You’ve got to draw the line somewhere,’ he joked. Likewise, he didn’t come to a large Liberal Party celebration of my 30 years in parliament in 2004, but instead asked me and my family to his home for a dinner to mark the occasion. Today we continue to discuss politics in an avid fashion, but with a sense of detachment.
My mother left me with a fount of old aphorisms and sayings, some of which endure today, others having slipped out of usage. ‘It’s a long road that has no turning’ is one that has largely disappeared. ‘Blood is thicker than water', though, remains a reasonably commonplace expression. It most certainly applied to the way my family handled political differences within.
The year 1970 was to be, for me, at a personal level, momentous. On 14 February I met Janette Parker, and was immediately smitten. She was a fantastic mix of brains and good looks. Fittingly, I suppose, the meeting had a political context. There was a by-election that day for the seat of Randwick, in the NSW Legislative Assembly. The previous incumbent, Lionel Bowen, had been elected as the federal Labor member for the seat of Kingsford Smith at the election late in 1969. The Labor candidate for Randwick was a very youthful Laurie Brereton, who became a senior minister both in state and federal Labor governments.
Janette had agreed to hand out how-to-vote tickets for the Liberal candidate, John McLaughlin, who, by coincidence, had been a law school colleague of mine a decade earlier. He had no chance of winning, and the Liberal campaign was very much a flag-flying exercise.
I had played cricket in the afternoon, but arrived in the electorate to help with scrutineering after the close of the polls at 8 pm. When the count had been completed, Liberal workers gathered at the Centennial Park home of a barrister, Malcolm Broun, to engage in the obligatory wake. It was there that Janette and I met.
From then on, we saw each other constantly. Janette was a high school teacher. She taught English and history at St Catherine’s Girls School, at Waverley, in Sydney. Before and after being at St Catherine’s Janette also taught, respectively, at Randwick Girls High School and at Killarney Heights High School. Though Janette never harboured a desire to enter the political arena herself, she was fascinated by the ongoing nature of the political contest. Over the years we have often agreed that politics is ‘the only game in town'.
Our views were similar on many issues, and she was a natural Liberal supporter, but her assessments were always self-generated. Like me, Janette had grown up in a household where both of her parents discussed politics. Her father, Charles Parker, had worked for the NSW railways, having joined the railway workshop in Newcastle as a young man prior to World War II. By the time of his retirement in 1973, he had risen to the position of Chief Civil Engineer. Although he held conservative views on most issues, because he had always been a public servant, he came at them often from a different perspective to mine.
Janette’s support and counsel throughout my career has been invaluable. To share a common interest in one’s vocation with one’s life’s partner is a real blessing. I know many politicians whose wives or husbands simply do not like politics and are constantly urging them, in one fashion or another, to leave the political arena. That never happened to me. From the start of our relationship Janette knew that my heart was set on a political career.
We became engaged in January 1971, and married on 4 April 1971 at St Peter’s Anglican Church, Watsons Bay, the local parish church attended by Janette and her mother. It is a beautiful church, perched on a cliff right beside the ocean, and close to the lighthouse at Watsons Bay. My best man was Alan Plumb, a fellow Young Liberal, who remains a close friend.
After we married, Janette and I rented a home unit in north Lane Cove, in the electorate of Bennelong. The Bennelong Liberal MP Sir John Cramer was 75 and would likely retire in the near future. I had firmly fixed my sights on winning preselection for that seat when Cramer went.
1970 ended poorly for both John Gorton and the Liberal Party. The Coalition fared very badly at a half-Senate election held in November. His detractors quickly blamed Gorton for the result. This added to the pressure on the Prime Minister.
The legendary political journalist Alan Reid had a colourful saying to describe a situation within a political party where an event, coming from nowhere, could bring about sudden change, usually of leadership. He would speak of there being ‘plenty of dry grass around', meaning that the leader’s position was inherently unstable, and all that was needed was for someone to throw a match to the dry grass. That was the position for John Gorton early in 1971. The person who threw the match was Malcolm Fraser.
Fraser had been one of John Gorton’s principal backers in 1968, when Gorton secured the leadership to succeed Holt and became PM. Yet it was Fraser quitting the Government, followed by a searing resignation speech, which triggered the events producing Gorton’s removal. Fraser had resigned because of what he regarded as Gorton’s disloyalty to him as Defence Minister, concerning press reports damaging to Fraser of army activities in Vietnam. He believed that Gorton could easily have stopped the story appearing, but had been content to let it go ahead — to Fraser’s embarrassment. In his speech Fraser went way beyond the immediate cause of his resignation, delivering a general broadside against Gorton’s style of government. This provoked the moving of a motion of confidence in Gorton in the party room which was sensationally tied — 33 each. Gorton used his casting vote to oust himself, thus surrendering the prime ministership.
The totally chaotic, and hopelessly compromised, way in which the Liberals changed from Gorton to McMahon was a symptom and not the cause of the party’s malaise after so long in office. Contested leadership changes should only occur where a majority clearly believe that an alternative to the incumbent can do a better job. In 1971, McMahon was not the preferred choice over Gorton. Rather, half the party room, for a whole variety of reasons, could no longer stomach Gorton. This was as much a reflection on their lack of foresight as it was on Gorton’s