Inside the Hawke–Keating Government

A Cabinet Diary

Gareth Evans

• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780522872750
• eBook ISBN: 9780522866438
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Globale Politik

As good as it gets in Australian politics. That's how the Hawke–Keating Government is now widely regarded. But how did this highly able, ambitious, strong-willed group work through its crises and rivalries, and achieve what it did?Gareth Evans' diary, written in the mid-1980s and published now for the first time, is the consummate insider's account. It not only adds much new material to the historical record, but is perceptive, sharp and unvarnished in its judgments, lucidly written, and often highly entertaining.

MINISTER FOR
RESOURCES AND ENERGY

MINISTER ASSISTING THE
PRIME MINISTER AND
FOREIGN MINISTER

Monday, 17 December 1984—Canberra

Straight from the airport to my new Department office in Civic for an endless succession of briefings, successively the Petroleum Division, the Coal and Minerals Division, the Uranium and Nuclear Division, and the Co-Ordination and Management Division. Eight hours, broken only by a sandwich lunch, with an endless barrage of figures, statistics, techniques, technologies, economic evaluations, judgements and prognostications, all of it establishing that which I already well knew to be the truth—that I know absolutely nothing about the content of the portfolio. But my new Permanent Secretary, Alan Woods, his deputies Denis Ives and Brian Hill, and the Department as a whole, strike me as capable and hard-headed.

Friday, 11 January 1985—Melbourne

My first day back on the job, and a very hectic one. Alan Woods and Denis Ives fly in together with my key Canberra staffers and we spend hours with my Melbourne-based team planning and finalising itineraries, visits and appointments for the next three or four months, and dealing with a series of administrative and policy issues requiring early attention.

The main meeting of the day is with David Parker, the WA Minister for Minerals and Energy, and someone who is likely to be one of my major sources of political difficulty over the period ahead, although we have always got on quite well personally. One of the brightest of the very bright, very young members of the Burke Cabinet, Parker is seen by most people as destined ultimately for higher things, and like most of the rest of his colleagues will approach the task without any accompanying baggage. He opens up the discussion on the Aboriginal land rights issue²⁹, and when I ask him whether ALP policy will play any role at all in Western Australia’s approach to this, his answer—with a completely straight face—is ‘none whatsoever’.

During our talk on this subject I am interrupted by a phone call from Clyde Holding. He tells me that his major land rights submission is scheduled for Cabinet on Monday, but my Department in my absence has put in a ‘bad’ coordination comment and he wants to talk to me over the weekend about it. Alan Woods tells me privately that an attempt has been made to ‘soften’ the Aboriginal Affairs proposal to some extent, but without going anything like the distance sought by the Western Australians. Clearly I’m going to have a job and a half on my hands trying to find a path through this one!

I go on to discuss with Parker the finalisation of royalty arrangements for the huge North West Shelf gas project, the country’s biggest ever resource development; the negotiation over Barrow Island, in which he drops something of a bombshell by saying that the kind of revenue-sharing position advanced recently by Commonwealth officials—involving our proposed new Resource Rent Royalty, which we are keen to get established for onshore oil-producing operations of this kind—is quite unacceptable, and that unless the matter is resolved to the State’s satisfaction they will be going back to the original plan of a State royalty taking precedence; the possible gold tax, in which I make it clear that I am not going to get myself into a position of being a political stalking horse to enable the WA Government to get itself off the hook; the question of monazite exports to France; and a miscellany of other technical matters which may or may not prove to have difficult political connotations. All of this is fairly hard going for me, but I feel on balance that I have held my end up, and there does not seem to be any evidence of anxiety on the part of my staff or officials to the contrary.

Monday, 14 January 1985—Canberra

The discussion of land rights in Cabinet is marked particularly by an extraordinary outburst from Kim Beazley, who seems no more willing than was David Parker last week to give any weight to ALP policy, and who—as usual—is in a condition of noisy panic at the obviously looming political difficulties in WA. Hawke’s suggestion that Brian Burke be allowed to come and talk to the Cabinet as a whole on the issue is resoundingly resisted, and we end up with the rather uneasy position of a group of ministers with major interests in the topic—Holding, me, Walsh, Beazley, Dawkins, Bowen and Kerin—being mandated to do some further work on the Commonwealth position paper and then have a discussion with the Western Australians.

I express the view that we seem unlikely ever to reach a compromise with the Western Australians that would be halfway acceptable to the movement, given their enthusiasm to take Aboriginal claims, and title, off the board completely when there is any conflict with a seriously pursued mining claim. Accordingly, we ought to devote our attention to developing a model that will be acceptable everywhere else in the country (always excepting Queensland) and which will represent some modification of the existing Northern Territory law. If the more civilised miners can bring themselves to agree with this package, the opportunity will present itself for at least some moral suasion to be mounted against WA, with no great skin off our nose if Burke wants to run an anti–Commonwealth Government line in the run-up to his State election, now likely early in 1986. But Hawke is very obviously ambivalent about the whole thing, and it is going to be very difficult to hold the line on any really important issue of principle.

A late dinner at EJ’s with Peter Walsh and Chris Hurford, the latter of whom distinguishes himself by demolishing a plate of roast duck, then complaining vigorously about its toughness, ensuring not only a discount on the bill but half a bottle of Grandfather Port by way of compensation.

Tuesday, 15 January 1985—Canberra

John Dawkins hosts a lunch for visiting Japanese MITI³⁰ Minister Keijiro Murata and his entourage, at which there is a deal of tension in the air, particularly between Alan Woods and his Trade counterparts, on the question as to whether it will be Trade or Resources which leads the proposed High Level Group of officials to jointly consider energy forecasts. I am hand-delivered before the lunch a letter from the PM advising that I, despite Trade’s objections, should have the carriage of the initiative. When communicated to Dawkins, this had generated an ‘explosion’ (in the words of the PM’s economic adviser, Ross Garnaut), with Joe marching in to see the PM, to be told that this was indeed the way it would be in the presentation to the Japanese. Dawkins tells me that he finds all this quite unacceptable, and that the PM has given him permission to raise it all again after the Japanese leave. I work on the assumption that it’s a fait accompli now, but clearly the flanks will need guarding.

Late in the afternoon, South Australian Premier John Bannon, who is over for tonight’s prime ministerial dinner, comes to see me with his concern about our proposed disposition of the Commonwealth uranium stockpile. He is worried about the implications of this for the commercial viability of Roxby Downs³¹, being heavily put up to this by Western Mining Corporation. But I explain the proposed course of action in some detail to him and soothe, I think, some of his more substantial fears. I am less successful in soothing him with my very cautious and somewhat negative response to his proposal that the Commonwealth contribute $25 million to the electricity grid connection he is planning with Victoria and NSW. The discussion is quite informal—just the two of us—and we part, as always, good friends. John rather wistfully comments that he may need to change his style and become, in the interests of his State and longer-term political survival, a thoroughgoing, unprincipled pain-in-the-arse like Brian Burke, who with all his rough tactics, very often succeeds in screwing a better deal out of the Commonwealth.

The dinner for Prime Minister Nakasone at the Lakeside Hotel is a rather stilted, formal affair, with the ‘Bob’ and ‘Yasuhiro’ name swapping seeming more forced than genuine. But Andrew Peacock makes us all feel better with a pompous and banal supporting speech, with florid references, inter alia, to the ‘endless adventure’ of Australia’s relationship with Japan. I am much in conversational demand throughout the evening from a succession of business gurus, including Gordon Jackson, Brian Loton and Kevan Gosper. It’s going to be that sort of portfolio.

Wednesday, 16 January 1985—Canberra

The morning begins with the formal talks with Nakasone, Murata and Foreign Minister Shintaro Abe, with whom Bill Hayden and I have a pleasantly informal chat about current Japanese politics before proceedings get underway. About forty Australian and Japanese ministers and officials crowd the Cabinet room, and about an hour and a half passes in stunning, stylised vacuousness, with me making no contribution whatsoever (similarly Hayden and Kerin), and with Button, Dawkins and Hurford as Acting Treasurer saying not much more. Hawke uses the occasion to raise three or four issues himself—market strategies, the liberalisation of the Australian economy, and beef—while Nakasone opens up on peace and disarmament (‘1985 will be very important in maintaining the momentum’), Pacific cooperation and the impact of US interest rates on the world economy. But none of it causes the increasingly heavy lids all around the room to flutter at any stage.

It all reminds me a little of the occasion I met an undergraduate activist coming away from the office of Sir George Paton, the Vice-Chancellor of Melbourne University, during my student days. ‘You know’, he said, ‘Sir George is the only very important person I’ve ever met who I always come away from feeling that he’s wasted my time!’. Bill Hayden says that it’s all very much par for the course and that he is constantly bored out of his mind by these very-high-level discussions. I just hope to God that they did get down to something important in their private sessions.

Thursday, 17 January 1985—Canberra

A meeting of the Land Rights Ministerial Working Group at which Kim Beazley is unrepentantly offensive to Clyde Holding, suggesting in effect he should play no personal part in further discussions with WA because he is persona non grata. Holding has been unfairly treated by Western Australian colleagues, who have wanted a whipping boy on this whole issue. It is true, though, that Clyde’s inattention to detail and laid-back rhetorical style have the capacity to exacerbate problems of this kind as well as to solve them. I hope that my own approach, which is to work closely through what is actually being proposed before I get too excited about rejecting it, will be more productive in the long run. We’ll see.

Friday, 18 January 1985—Melbourne

A heavy round of meetings: first with twenty senior Japanese bureaucrats and executives associated with the Brown Coal Liquefaction Plant project³² in the Latrobe Valley; then with BHP for a major briefing session and lunch involving some fifteen executives under Brian Loton; and then with David White, the Victorian Minerals and Energy Minister, followed by a roundtable with John Cain and most of his Cabinet and the Victorian Federal ministers to try to resolve areas of actual and possible difficulty that might impact on the forthcoming State election—an endless, boring, circular discussion which Jim Kennan tells me is par for the course for the Victorian Cabinet.

To round off the day, I sit down with the Managing Director of Esso Australia, Jim Kirk, and Russell Fynmore, the head of BHP Petroleum, to talk through their objections to our proposed limitation—approved by Cabinet just before Christmas—on the disproportionate lifting of ‘new’ oil from Bass Strait fields, which if continued could cost us something over $ 100 million in Federal excise revenue, given the rates are much lower on this category (designed to encourage new development) than on ‘old’ oil coming from previously developed Bass Strait fields. Forewarned by both David White and Alan Woods about Kirk’s head-on bluster style, I am unfazed by his opening bursts suggesting that this is the most serious attack both on private enterprise principles and the operation of the Bass Strait system since the project began. I make it clear that there are trade-offs and compromises involved all round, and that while I don’t necessarily want to go down the path of statutory direction, the Commonwealth simply just cannot stand by and see its revenue erode. After forty minutes or so of this, the matter is amicably resolved, at least for the remainder of this financial year—at which time the whole thing will have to be renegotiated, which we expect. Kirk says he will ensure us our targeted revenue subject only to acts of God, on the basis that we don’t create a precedent at this stage by making a formal directive.

Saturday, 19 January 1985—Perth

The meeting on Aboriginal land rights in the Premier’s conference room gets started on schedule at 7.30 am, with a very full complement of Western Australian ministers and officials present. Clyde Holding and I outline the Commonwealth’s preferred model, emphasising over and again that we have, for better or worse, made two massive concessions—largely explicit in what Hawke has already put on the record publicly—and that these make unnecessary those more extreme parts of the WA legislation designed to override Aboriginal claims completely in any contest with a serious mining claim. We conclude by me summarising, under six headings, areas of evident disagreement, but where options for possible reconciliation have emerged—viz. land available for claims, protection of Aboriginal title once granted, access to land, sacred sites, claim procedures, and compensation principles and procedures.

There is agreement that this be worked up into a discussion document in the next couple of days, and that it form the foundation of next week’s round of discussions between Burke and the Cabinet Committee. I come away feeling that we have had a very successful morning, and that there is some chance at the end of the day of avoiding a major confrontation. Nobody underestimates the difficulty, of course, of selling the veto and ad valorem compensation qualifications to both the Aboriginal and Labor movements, but the arguments are sustainable both intellectually and morally, and they are about the only things going in terms of the overall realpolitik. Burke’s capacity for sheer bloody-minded intransigence can never be underestimated, but I do at least think we have a model which can weld together the other States, Queensland apart, into some common position, and give us some leverage for continuing to put pressure on Western Australia in the longer term, even if, in the shorter term, they dig their heels in.

Sunday, 20 January 1985—Melbourne

A quiet day at home, after all the whirl of the last week, largely spent sitting in the sun in the backyard working through a largish accumulated pile of departmental submissions and correspondence. Looking back on my first few days of real involvement in my portfolio, I think that I am enjoying it despite myself. Whenever I think about the circumstances of my portfolio shift, the degree of humiliation associated with it, and the abrupt termination of dreams and goals and plans that it entailed, I feel both depressed and angry. But whenever I get immersed in the day-to-day swirls and eddies of my job, particularly given the wholly different intellectual and other skills it is obviously going to demand, I’m quite intrigued and excited by it. Certainly I have enjoyed all the face-to-face discussion with ministers and business leaders, and I am acutely conscious of the significance of what I’ve been involved in, in a direct and immediate way, for the Australian economy. I am also conscious that if I do succeed—and am perceived as succeeding—in this job, I will over a relatively short period almost wholly erase the negative imagery of the last few months, and put myself back in a strong political position. Life moves on.

Monday and Tuesday, 21–22 January 1985—Gippsland

A two-day visit to the Latrobe Valley and Bass Strait by car, light aircraft and helicopter. We start with the Morwell open-cut and power station sites, then it’s on to the Brown Coal Liquefaction Plant pilot project, where there is a welcoming party of fifty or so enthusiastically clapping Japanese employees—and a much smaller and less-enthusiastically clapping group of natives, less enchanted by being brought in on their day off. I walk around the pilot project gazing learnedly at the incomprehensible tangle of pipes. But there are many more to come: at Esso’s Longford gas plant, out on the offshore Fortescue platform and Polaris derrick barge, and at Long Island Point in Westernport where the Commonwealth cash registers tick over and the crude is shipped or sent on its way by pipeline. All helpful educative stuffing.

Wednesday, 23 January 1985—Canberra/Melbourne

The meeting with Brian Burke takes nearly four hours, and in fact goes off quite well. Hawke chairs the meeting, which is held in the Cabinet room with a few officials present, and I and Clyde Holding make most of the running on our side, with the other ministers—Walsh, Kerin, Dawkins and Beazley—coming and going without much substantive input. We get straight down to the details of the ‘issues’ document that emerged from Saturday’s meeting and work our way systematically through the areas of contention, with Burke giving significant ground on nearly all of them. The sticking points we are left with are, first, the question as to whether lesser mining interests (exploration licences and the like) should be subject to terms and conditions negotiations and tribunal recommendations, as the Commonwealth insists, or whether they should be immune from any balancing exercise with coexisting Aboriginal land rights. The other is whether, and to what extent, compensation should be payable for social disruption of Aboriginal communities, and in particular psychological and spiritual damage. But, generally speaking, the meeting does go off with a minimum of histrionics, and Burke’s subsequent press conference is not quite as tendentious in claiming victory as we have come to expect.

Before going into the Burke meeting I had a brief two-out exchange with Hawke in which he asked me how John Dawkins had reacted to the officials’ energy committee with the Japanese, saying that—in answer to my obvious question—he had no intention whatsoever of resiling from his decision that my Department, not Trade, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Cabinet Diary
• Attorney-General
• Minister for Resources and EnergyMinister Assisting the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister
• Hawke–Keating Government Members 1984–1986
• Biographical Notes
• Acknowledgements
• Index