Prime movers who shaped our nation, part 3
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| Then, there are the pygmies, or perhaps in these days of rampant
political correctness, persons of retarded political growth. Leading this undistinguished list easily is William McMahon, perhaps the worst prime minister this nation has ever endured. March 1971, when John Gorton fell on his sword after a Liberal Party meeting, was the high spot of McMahon's period in office. The former Sydney lawyer and man-about-town had coveted the job for years. His colleagues knew it; his vaulting ambition was a standing political joke. But no joke for the hard man of the then Country Party, Sir John "Black Jack" McEwen. When Harold Holt drowned off Portsea in December 1969, showing off to a close lady friend, demonstrably not his wife, and with a few pre-prandial gins-and-tonic under his belt, the brutal old McEwen blackballed McMahon. In this, he was ably assisted by the then governor-general, Sir Richard Gardiner Casey, with a vice-regal interference in party politics that, repeated today, would see the incumbent out of Yarralumla faster than you could say "God Save the Queen". As external affairs minister, McMahon was never allowed to meet senior diplomats or international politicians without at least two members of the department by his side. His reputation as treasurer owed much to his ability to argue his department's brief and to his own self-promotion as a hard worker. As a bachelor navy minister he was notorious for co-opting handsome young sailors in tight-fitting bell-bottom trousers to caddy for him at golf. His marriage, at the age of 57, to a Sydney socialite, both younger and taller, seemed only to accentuate the sense of the ridiculous that engulfed William McMahon. With his prominent ears, his squeaky high voice, his elevated heels, McMahon was a risible figure. His elevation to the top job was only possible in the wake of the post-Menzies, post-Holt confusion and McMahon's own vigorous plotting. The feline Gough Whitlam dubbed him "Tiberius on the telephone". But Whitlam's criticism of McMahon was nothing to that of his former Cabinet colleague and one-time rival, Paul Hasluck: "Disloyal, devious, dishonest, untrustworthy, petty, cowardly". Harold Holt, too, was a political pygmy. A good-minded pygmy, noble in purpose but a pygmy nevertheless. He was also a worrier, a man consumed by the cares of office. Anointed by Sir Robert Menzies as his successor, Holt was known to boast that he achieved the office without climbing over any political bodies. That was Holt's tragedy. That, and his foreign policy of "All the way with LBJ". Holt's replacement, John Grey Gorton, might have been a great prime minister, had he been more disciplined, less fond of a drink, less susceptible to the charms of young women and less afflicted with backbench critics. Gorton, the World War II fighter pilot with the smashed up face and the cheeky grin, was a larrikin. He was also a nationalist, a centralist, and deeply suspicious of the Americans in Vietnam. The backwoodsmen in his party hated him for it. Stanley Melbourne Bruce was another in the retarded political growth class. A member of one of Australia's great mercantile families, young Stanley was educated at Cambridge where he rowed. Later, he was briefly a barrister in London. During World War I, he was wounded at Gallipoli, but not with the Australian Imperial Force. As befitted the son of an Anglo-Australian family, Bruce was serving with the British Army. As prime minister, he is remembered best for being the only incumbent of that office to lose his seat in a general election. It was 1929 and Bruce had taken on the union movement over the arbitration commission. Bruce ended up in London, as the Australian high commissioner and remained there during World War II, a fact that reflects no credit on Labor leader John Curtin. Joining the spats-wearing S.M. Bruce in the shorter class is Joseph Aloysius Lyons. But Lyons also belongs in another class: that dubbed "rats". He was a former Labor politician who switched to the conservatives, largely under the influence of his wife, the formidable Dame Enid. She was the much better politician, although Lyons had the misfortune to be prime minister during the Depression of the 1930s. That depression would have broken a much better politician than the hapless Lyons, incidentally the only Catholic ever to lead a conservative government. Lyons's ratting, however, was nothing compared to that of William Morris Hughes who managed, through a combination of political ambition, a serious misjudging of the Australian people and his own curious personality, to split the ALP in 1916. Although small — Donald Horne once famously described him as a "little bag of bones done up in gent's natty suiting" — Hughes could never have been regarded as a political pygmy. He once boasted in Parliament that he had been present at the birth of the great Australian political parties, Labor and Liberal. "What about the Country Party, Billy?" came the interjection. "Ah brother," he said, "You have to draw the line somewhere." Welsh-born, with all the slyness occasionally unfairly attributed to those conquered Celts, Hughes was another famous plotter and schemer. Today, Hughes is probably best remembered for two things: splitting the Labor Party over conscription and his longevity in Parliament, dying at the age of 90 while still a member. Australia maintained its contribution to World War I without conscription but Hughes had been duchessed by the Brits early in 1916 and was convinced the carnage of the Somme battle that year left no alternative but compulsory service. The nation disagreed — twice. Of the early prime ministers, Sir Edmund Barton's reputation is being restored, Alfred Deakin has long been acknowledged as a substantial leader at a difficult time while the others, J.C. Watson, Sir George Reid, Andrew Fisher and Sir Joseph Cook remain of little interest except to devoted students of the period. Then, of course, there were the temporary leaders, the stop-gaps like Francis Michael Forde, Sir Arthur Fadden and Sir Earle Page. Forde was an ordinary army minister and an even less distinguished temporary prime minister; Page was a scheming Country Party doctor. As for Fadden, the title of his autobiography, They Called Me Artie, seemed to sum it up. Nice bloke, but a lightweight. |
Sir William McMahon
Gough Whitlam
Malcolm Fraser
Robert Hawke
Paul Keating
John Howard |
