They hadn’t come to apologise but to acknowledge, grudgingly, that the game was up. They accepted that the Liberal and National parties, facing an election on 11 July, needed to cobble together as much unity as possible, even though it was the 11th hour.
Maybury had brought an armful of research material with him. He plonked it on the lounge room floor. Given that the die was already cast, I didn’t quite see the point of this. The bizarre feature of the evening was that he kept telling all of us that it would have been possible for Joh to have made it, if it hadn’t been for what he saw to be the perfidy of the NSW Nationals.
He was right, but I was the last person to think that the NSW Nationals had done the wrong thing. To me, they had been heroes. For all the political skills and strategic planning of which the Queensland Nationals were alleged to have been capable, they had ignored the most fundamental step needed to achieve their goal. They had not enlisted the support of the National Party organisation throughout Australia for the ‘Joh for PM’ campaign. Without this they never had any hope. Doug Moppett and his colleagues had outsmarted them.
The real rabbit killer to the ‘Joh for PM’ campaign had been delivered at a meeting in my office in Canberra just a few weeks earlier. Then an agreement was struck, not only to maintain the decades-old joint Senate ticket between the Liberal Party and the National Party in New South Wales, but to implement a strategy that would cripple Joh in New South Wales.
That meeting was attended by Doug Moppett, the chairman of the NSW Nationals, his state director, Jenny Gardiner, Bronwyn Bishop, president of the NSW division of the Liberal Party, Dr Graeme Starr, the state director of the Liberals, as well as Tony Eggleton, Ian Sinclair and me.
Moppett had shown genuine strength in the face of the Queensland push. From the beginning he had been scathing about what his northern confrères had in mind, and contemptuous of the way in which they had undermined his federal leader, Ian Sinclair. He and Jenny Gardiner shared the historic warmth of the NSW Nationals towards cooperation with the Liberals.
I had always strongly supported close cooperation with the Nationals. The reaffirmation of the joint NSW Senate ticket was very important. Equally important was our agreement that if any ‘Joh for PM’ Nationals stood against sitting Liberals, then the NSW Nationals would campaign against the Joh Nationals in support of sitting Liberal candidates. In similar vein, the Liberal Party would support sitting Nationals and Nationals endorsed by the party organisation in New South Wales against any ‘Joh for PM’ Nationals. This tight electoral pact was designed to shut out the Queenslanders. It succeeded.
Although Sparkes and Holm said very little, Maybury bitterly complained about what the NSW Nationals had done. It was quite extraordinary, because he was venting his spleen to someone who thought that the NSW Nationals had behaved honourably and in the best traditions of close coalition harmony. I thought that Doug Moppett, in particular, had displayed tenacity and strength where many others melted away.
We talked at our Wollstonecraft home for about an hour and a half. The message out of the meeting was clear. The ‘Joh for PM’ campaign was finished, but they thought it had all been rather unfair, because if the rest of the National Party had come on board it might have been successful!
Given all that had happened over the preceding few months, I felt considerable relief. There still remained the awkward issue of a meeting between the Queensland Premier and me. We all knew that without that meeting and a declaration from the two of us that we would work together, there was no hope of stitching up even a façade of unity for the election campaign. They wanted me to go and see Joh in Brisbane in the next few days.
After Sparkes, Holm and Maybury left, I held a council of war with my two Canberra colleagues and Janette. Despite all the rough edges, and the possibility that I would be criticised for going cap in hand to someone I had called a ‘wrecker', we all agreed that it was more important to achieve the public outcome we wanted than worry about personal dignity. To have any hope at all in the election we needed to put as much of the Coalition disunity behind us as possible. We could not even begin to do this unless Bjelke-Petersen and I had been seen to have mended fences.
I went back to Canberra that night with Grahame Morris and Tony Eggleton. The following day was devoted to a series of phone calls between me, Sparkes and Stone.
In my discussions, I told both Stone and Sparkes that whilst I accepted that a visit to Brisbane was necessary I would not undertake it in the absence of a guarantee that Joh would come good on acknowledging that his Canberra fantasy was over. They gave me those guarantees. I remained dubious but arranged to fly to Brisbane the next day.
There was a lot of fog at Canberra Airport the following morning, but that was not the real reason for my delayed departure on the RAAF jet. Maybury had rung Eggleton very early to say that Joh was having second thoughts — more likely that Maybury had persuaded Joh to have those second thoughts. At one point Maybury rang my home looking for me. He spoke to Janette and told her that the whole thing was off. Agonising phone calls followed, with my speaking to Sparkes, Maybury and finally Joh. I obtained Joh’s word. His press secretary, Ken Crook, even read out the news release Joh would issue.
I finally left for Brisbane. The meeting with the Queensland Premier was awkward but it achieved its purpose. A statement was issued which declared our determination to work together to defeat the Hawke Government. Deference was paid to the Queensland Nationals’ views on taxation, without compromising anything which the Liberal Party might say on the subject during the election campaign. Bjelke-Petersen’s demeanour was of a man who knew that his great dream would not be realised.
When I returned to Canberra, the house was still sitting. There were predictable cries of derision from the Labor side of the house that I had behaved weakly towards Bjelke-Petersen. I was happy to wear all of that. Hawke even moved a censure motion against me; that was going too far. He sounded rather foolish. A week earlier I would not have thought anything like what had been achieved in the previous 48 hours was remotely possible. Against all the odds of recent months, I now gave the Liberal Party just a faint chance of winning the election racing towards us. But the odds against us were colossal.
* * *
The really fatal blow to our 1987 election campaign was the discovery by the Labor Government of a double counting error in the Liberal tax policy after that policy had been released on 10 June at Box Hill in Melbourne.
Savings from cutting expenditure on certain programs were also included in savings from reducing payments to the states which, in turn, had included some payments under those same programs. The mistake involved several hundred million dollars. The tax policy document had been largely prepared in my office but also with the involvement of the relevant shadow ministers. All had been working under near impossible conditions, but when parties make mistakes of this kind, they have to carry the blame. No excuses are permitted. It was our mistake, and when it was exposed, it did us irreparable damage. If the policy had been prepared under different conditions, then adequate time would have been available for further checking, and I am sure that the mistake would not have arisen.
I had to go through the painful experience of calling a press conference, admitting the error and endeavouring to explain that the tax commitments we had made elsewhere in the policy could be properly funded in another manner. I did the best I could but the damage had already been done. Although he did not tell me at the time, Tony Eggleton later let me know that a private poll conducted for the party by Gary Morgan not long after the tax error was discovered showed that the Coalition was 18 points behind Labor.
Although