Earlwood Primary School reflected the locality which it serviced. About half of my final-year class had fathers who were tradesmen, and in most other cases they worked in banks, insurance companies or utilities, with just two or three in small business.
In my last year at Earlwood, I had a wonderful teacher, Jack Doherty. He constantly fed my interest in current affairs and conducted plenty of additional question periods on the news of the time. A very fine ABC Radio program called The World We Live In, narrated by H.D. Black (later Sir Hermann and Chancellor of Sydney University) and which extensively covered world affairs, was a regular part of our class work. This was in 1951, and the Korean War was still raging. One of the hotly debated issues then was the sacking of General Douglas MacArthur by President Harry Truman. This was a big call by Truman. MacArthur was an iconic World War II figure who had established his headquarters in Brisbane after being pushed out of the Philippines by the Japanese. From there he led the Allied fightback, which ended in victory. When the Korean War started in June 1950 with communist North Korea invading South Korea, MacArthur was the Supreme Allied Commander in the Pacific.
He clashed with Truman over the conduct of the Korean War, wanting to carry the fight against the Chinese, who had come in on the side of the North, over the North Korean border into China itself. Truman opposed this and when their differences could not be resolved, Truman, as Commander-in-Chief, sacked him. I followed these developments avidly.
At the end of primary school, when I was 12, I made my first public speech, at the school presentation day at the local Mayfair Theatre in Earlwood. The headmaster was retiring, and I gave a short speech of thanks on behalf of the teachers and pupils, and presented him with a watch. I was nervous, but it seemed to go well. My father and mother were both there and appeared very proud. Dad was so pleased he gave me my first fountain pen to mark the occasion. I needed one for high school.
My interest in politics mounted during my years at Canterbury Boys’ High School, where my active participation in school debates and as a member of the school’s debating team in the Combined High Schools’ (CHS) competition laid the groundwork for such speaking skills as I was able to bring with me into public life years later. I learned then the great value of speaking ‘off the cuff', because a significant part of the debating curriculum required me to speak in an impromptu fashion on subjects of which I had no prior notice. It was marvellous training. It was invaluable during my early years in parliament when, at a moment’s notice, I was able to respond to the whip’s call and jump into a debate.
The immense merit of formal debating is the discipline of having to articulate the reasons for holding a particular opinion. Years later, in public life, I learned that it was not enough simply to assert a strongly held view. Logically arranged arguments, explaining why that view was held, were crucial. My friend and long-time advisor Grahame Morris would often say to me, when discussing an announcement, ‘Boss, what’s the why?’ In other words, he wanted to hear my explanation.
Perhaps my love of debating, or the chronological memory gifted to me by my mother, or both of them, meant that I never felt comfortable reading a prepared speech. In senior office, it was essential, on certain occasions, to do so. Nonetheless, less than 10 per cent of the speeches I gave as Prime Minister were read from a prepared text. I feel that I always give my best speeches when, having thought about what I will say, I then eyeball the audience, and speak directly to the people in it. Never in my life have I used an autocue or teleprompter. I hold them in contempt as rhetorical crutches.
Canterbury High wasn’t all debating though. I played both cricket and rugby in the school’s second XI and second XV respectively, in the CHS competition. History and English were far and away the subjects I enjoyed and excelled in most. History fascinated me. One of my real educational regrets was that I never did an arts or economics degree as a precursor to law. Amongst other benefits, it would have allowed me to further indulge my passion for history.
My Leaving Certificate exams, in 1956, were sat against the backdrop of the brutal Soviet invasion of Hungary and the controversial Anglo-French Suez operation. On the happier side there was the great excitement of the Olympic Games coming to Melbourne. It was also a time when Robert Menzies appeared to have established a stranglehold on Australian politics, courtesy of the bitter Labor split of 1955 and the ultimate emergence of the Democratic Labor Party (DLP), initially called the Labor Party (Anti-Communist), which in 1961 would save Menzies from otherwise certain defeat.
Both of my parents were fierce believers in private enterprise. This was barely surprising, given that my father had worked incredibly long hours for more than 20 years in building up his garage business in Dulwich Hill, an inner suburb of Sydney. He was a qualified motor mechanic, and the garage he ran provided the full range: not only did he serve petrol, but he also serviced and repaired cars. In my lifetime, Dad always opened the garage on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Only on Christmas Day, Good Friday and Anzac Day was the garage closed all day. Years earlier it had been even tougher, with Dad not getting home until about 10 o’clock at night, after he had closed.
If you ran a small business, there was nothing particularly strange about this. Both then and now, running a small business of the sole trader or sole owner type entails a total commitment of time and energy. There are no guaranteed market shares, and no penalty rates or overtime for effort beyond normal working hours. The qualitative difference between owning and operating a genuinely small business and working, even at a senior executive level, in a large corporation is immense and rarely understood by those not involved in it.
My father was always very tired when he came home from the garage, particularly on Saturdays, when he would often spend most of the afternoon resting. The business was discussed over the dinner table. My brothers had helped out, serving petrol and doing other tasks at the garage. I couldn’t wait until I was old enough so I could have a go as well. I started when I was about 14. I loved it. It was a real buzz serving petrol, checking oil levels, pumping up tyres and trying to sell a few ‘sundries', such as new spark plugs. Years later Paul Keating would sneeringly refer to the ‘bowser boy from Canterbury’ (sic). To me it was a badge of honour.
I enjoyed meeting the customers, who, my father reminded me, were always right. I had quite an argument with one customer, who insisted on smoking a cigarette as he stood beside me while I pumped petrol into the tank of his car. In the end I pulled the nozzle of the pump out of the tank. Then he put out his cigarette. I hope he stayed as a customer.
Like all service stations of that time, my father’s sold all different brands of petrol. Unlike many others, though, Dad owned the freehold of his garage. From the early 1950s onwards, the major oil companies began an aggressive ‘one brand’ service station expansion policy of either building new service stations or doing deals, of various kinds, with existing operators, so that only one brand of fuel was sold at a site. This intensified competition as the number of sites expanded rapidly, with new operators often being obliged to open for longer hours. It was hard for someone in my father’s position to match this. The inevitable business pressure affected Dad’s health. Although he didn’t want to go one-brand, it became a commercial necessity as there was a small rebate per gallon paid to owners who sold only one brand. He signed up with Mobilgas in 1954.
The one-brand switch badly affected Dad’s business, but it had to be accepted as a tough but unavoidable competitive development which could occur in any market. What could not, however, be viewed in the same light was an arbitrary edict delivered by the local Marrickville Council later in the year.
The council told him to remove his petrol bowsers from the kerbside in front of his service station, as it wanted traffic lights installed on the street corner where the garage stood. This was tantamount to telling Dad to close down his business. Neither the council nor the NSW Government authority, at whose instigation the council would have acted, offered any compensation for the potential destruction of my father’s business. It dealt a real body blow to my father and, coming on top of the market-related setbacks he had suffered, left