I:.
PRIME MINISTER
ADDRESS BY THE PRIME MINISTER, THE HON PJ. KEATING, MP
TO THE WALKLEY AWARDS PRESENTATION DINNER ANA HOTEL,
SYDNEY, 27 NOVEMBER 1992
Ladies and gentlemen
It is a great pleasure to be here tonight.
It is always a pleasure to be among the nation's press.
I have only a hazy idea of why this is so.
But that is better than the Leader of the Opposition who has no idea at all.
Let me get the politics over with early. I don't share this Nixonian you won't have me to
kick around any more attitude.
I like engagement.
The Garboesque has no attraction for me. I don't want to be alone.
I ask myself these days does this make me peculiar?
That I like to talk to the press?
That, wrong-headed or inconvenient as they sometimes are, like journalists?
That like politics?
Am I wrong to believe that for all the inevitable imperfections this is one of the world's
better democracies and Australian journalists are a powerful reason why this is so?
I don't think I IM wrong.
I think it must be a kind of cultural attraction that you have for me.
I see the press down the back of the plane on overseas trips fierce and hungry, like
grizzly bears on a package tour of the Orient.
There are members of my staff who are too frightened to walk down the aisle between
them to go to the toilet. 4423
They wait till nightfall and tiptoe down when they're all asleep little knowing that
journalists ame at their most dangerous after dark.
Yet I can't resist going down for a yarn..
I think the reason I enjoy the company of journalists, even when I can see by the look in
their eyes that they would like to tear me limb from limb, is that Ilactually like democracy.
It has its problems, democracy.. It doesn't always turn up the results we want. It can be as
frustrating to those of us who want change as it is to conservatives who want the world to
stand still.
But it's far and away the best form of government anybody has ever come up with, and I
must say I think it is my natural habitat.
In fact it seems to mec that in Australia we probably don't sufficiently appreciate the facts
of our democratic achievement that this is one of the great democracies of the world
and, we shouldn't forget, one of the oldest.
Those who complain about politics and politicians in Australia have a point. The number
of our governments creates a demand for good politicians in excess of the supply.
And the good ones have to learn to live in a maelstrom which is often made more by
media forces than by political or policy ones.
Televising parliament has dramatically increased that tendency and set all sorts of new
ii-iWa'o-i & litical success.
For every politician who thrives in this environment there are others who drown, or who
merely cling to the sides, or stay forever unnoticed, tucked up in the vortex.
There is a lot of room for improvement. It does get a bit rugged, and, no doubt, dispiriting
for electors.
But so long s! iQuestion-Time is the televised spectacle of questions without notice being
fired at ministers in the hope of getting them to publicly slip up, there will be severe
pressures on nicety and decorum.
And so long as it is also the forum in which the great questions of the day are fought out, it
will be more than a game of croquet. It will be very often verbal war and no one
prepared to go to war should fight it with less than total commitment.
And really, while it is more public now than perhaps it used to be, the House of
Representatives has always been a rugged place.
Since Federation since parliaments began there has been sniping and pantomime in
styles as various as the human personality.
There has been absolute savagery sometimes.
And we Australians are not alone in it.
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Few Australian politicians have declared their loathing of their opponents in the terms that
Winston Churchill did.
" I hate the Tory party" he said " their men, their words, and their methods."
rye always had a soft spot for Churchill.
That was the same Winston Churchill who, in the House of Commons, called Ramsay
MacDonald " the boneless wonder".
Yet in Australia, which is said to be such a rough-house, it would be considered a bit
beyond the bounds of decency in Australia to say you actually hated the Opposition.
At the very least you would have to be funny about it.
And I know if I called someone " the boneless wonder" on a day when there was not much
other news around, you could be sure that night there would be a fair bit of pious clicking
of tongues in the vicinity of television screens.
Particularly because the grab, almost certainly, would be taken out of its context.
Context is everything.
What Churchill described to the House was how he had been taken to the circus as a child,
where the advertised exhibit which most interested him had been the one described as Thse
Boneless Wonder.
He went on to say " My parents judged that the spectacle would be too revolting for my
youthful eyes and I have waited fifty years to see The Boneless Wonder sitting on the
Treasury Bench".
You would never get all that on the TV news.
It would just be a grab of me shouting over the din of the Opposition " I've waited fifty
years to see The Boneless Wonder". And a cut-away to Peter Reith feigning hurt and
outrage. Lloyd George once described the House of Commons as being to, a politician what a pub
is to a drunkard meaning that it is their natural envirornent and source of happiness,
however perverse.
I would say much the same about the House of Representatives or any great democratic
chamber. And I'd also say to those who believe that the standard of the place will be raised by
replacing the politicians with some species of non-politician that it would no more do
that, than a pub would be improved by having a clientele of wowsers.
Or a newspaper would be a better newspaper for being written by people without a taste
for politics and people.
Better to have better politicians. Ones who have enough faith in the strength of this
democracy to be prepared to push changes. Tough ones. Passionate ones. Ones who
understand politics and power. 4425
And better to have journalists who understand these things too.
And proprietors who understand them.
There is a cast to Australian democracy which is unique, and which has given us, I
believe, unique advantages.
The principal thing to understand is that it conmes from the bottom up it is not imposed
from the top.
And I believe that its a source of strength.
If the democracies have been the successful societies of the past century, the most
successful democracies have been the social democracies.
The ones that have not feared the inclusion of the less well off in the social system, or
discarded the social net: but who have seen their strength in it, the source of their selfesteem,
the measure of their worth and national achievement.
If you measure the achievements of Australia, this is where they principally lie. They are
democratic achievements, or, at least, they are cast in a democratic mould.
The fundamentals were laid down at the time of federation or before.
And since then, from the principles of arbitration and the basic wage to the development
of social services with few rivals in the world, the cast of politics in Australia has been
democratic. It underpins the success of multiculturalism, no less than it underpinned the ethos of the
first AIF and the legend it created.
These are out of the egalitarian stamp of Australia.
The same thing underpins the Accol. It underpins our recently revived reputation for
advanced social legislation.
It underpins, I would say, the decision to abolish the discrimination against homosexuals
in the armed force.
It is decisions like this which keep us in the front rank of democracies.
When people say they want to break the mould of Australian politics would say watch
out! Because you can't break it without threatening the mould of society too you can't break
it without threatening the democracy.
And that I think is why it is the case that those who are talking about breaking the mould
of politics carry with them policies to break the mould of Australian society.
Perhaps they fail to understand that the two can't be separated.
Perhaps they understand it very well.
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Perhaps they don't understand that, of all the values and traditions which bind Austraia
those of the people are the strongest and the most important.
Perhaps they confuse tradition with class and caste and official ritual.
it would not be surprising if it was simple confusion: becaus the conservatives in this
country have very often been confused about the fact that our institutions and traditions
belong to the people they made the best of them and if they need changing they will
change them.
I will forgive them their ignorance, of course.
But I doubt if Australians will when they get their chance to judge.
And that, rm inclined to think, is what politicians and political journalists have always to
remember. That politics doesn't start in Canberra. It ends there.
And, just as it does politicians good to escape the unreal world of Canberra, it would do
the political culture no harm if the gallery sometimes extended the peripheries of their
vision. There is a culture in Canberra which encourages politicians and press alike to see only the
links and not the chain.
T7hey are very small links in a very long chain.
They are no more than each day in the political life of the country.
it seems to me that this is one of the reasons why journalists often feel obliged to
editorialise in news stories: it is the only way to make sense of what is more often than not
an uncompleted story.
Too often I think.
I do believe Australians have to pick their way through too much opinion to get to the
news. in fact the opinion becomes part of the news the news today is that Michelle appears to
have changed her mind. Or Geoff has not changed his. Or the jury's still out on what
conclusion Peter will come to.
I do think the Australian news is over interpreted.
I know Gerard Henderson has been saying lately that journalists should improve their
knowledge of history and I agree with him.
He also reckons I should improve mine and I don't agree with him.
But the point is well taken. 4427
It's not to sy I don't thoroughily enjoy the daily meal the gallery makes of our activities, to
acknowledpe that the democratic culture would be better served by mome of the broader
style of political journalism, and more matter of fact reporting of political events.
I think the bers could hunt in a bigger circle the bigger circle of Australian democracy,
the provenance of our institutions and traditions and ideas.
But I think with equal certainty that what is done now is essential and is done remarkably
well. It is literally true that democracy is impossible without a free press.
And it is literally true, and patently true every day of the political year, that the democracy
which is practised in Canberra would be impossible without the free press which operates
there.
Thank you for having me here.
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