It Wasn't Only Hot Air

by Mike Steketee - The Australian

A treasured memento from covering politics in 1987 is a brush with a brass plate inscribed "Joh Egg on the Face Brush".

The idea was that, when Joh Bjelke-Petersen - you just mark my words - became prime minister, I would have to start scrubbing vigorously. It was sent by Queensland National Party federal MP Peter Slipper, one of the most enthusiastic boosters of the Joh-for-Canberra campaign.

Joh's supporters were like that: they were into conviction politics, like their leader. The Queensland premier wanted only positive people around him. Shades of George W. Bush.

He was not interested in people telling him why he could not do things; after all, he had carved out his own legend in Queensland politics by doing the impossible, winning election after election in the state (even if it was with the help of a gerrymander that meant the Nationals needed as little as 20 per cent of the primary vote), governing in his own right without having to worry about those wishy-washy Liberals (more thanks to the gerrymander) and sending Gough Whitlam packing (even if it was by breaking the rules and appointing an independent to fill a Labor Senate vacancy, thus giving the federal Opposition the numbers to block the 1975 budget).

That helps explain what in hindsight seems an even more bizarre episode in Australian politics than it did at the time. The Nationals were dominant in Queensland but nowhere else.

In the lower house in Canberra, they held 21 of the 148 seats and their representation was confined to Queensland, NSW and Victoria. Yet Joh's plan at age 75 was to win a federal seat, replace Ian Sinclair as the Nationals' leader, win the next election and push Liberal leader John Howard aside to become prime minister. Or something like that.

The End of Certainty, Paul Kelly's book on the politics of the 1980s, includes an extract from an interview with the Queensland premier on the ABC's AM program:

Q. Sir Joh, how can you expect to stay part of the National Party?

A. I'm not interested in staying part of the National Party. I'm only interested in doing what the people of Australia deserve.

Q. You might resign from the National Party?

A. I won't resign from the National Party.

Q. But you just said you're not interested in staying part of the National Party.

A. Well, I can't stay ...

Q. So if the National Party in Canberra won't do what you want, will you leave the National Party?

A. Lead it, I'll lead it, not leave it.

Q. No, I said leave it, leave it.

A. No, don't be stupid ... otherwise I won't talk to you.

Who said politics can't be entertaining?

Yet the mistake that Howard and particularly Sinclair made was that they did not take Joh seriously enough. He filled a vacuum, created by the belief that Howard could never defeat Bob Hawke.

Joh-for-Canberra attracted an extraordinary cast of characters including, ahem, colourful Gold Coast businessmen Brian Ray and Michael Gore, miners Lang Hancock and Charles Copeman, Australian Medical Association president Bruce Shepherd and yachtsman Ben Lexcen.

National Farmers Federation head Ian McLachlan, later to become defence minister in the Howard Government, talked terms with the Joh forces before pulling out at the last minute. Former federal Treasury secretary John Stone signed up and set to work on a policy for a single rate income tax. Katharine West beat the drum for the premier in her columns in The Australian. Historian Geoffrey Blainey made sympathetic noises.

Then there were the politicians. Queensland minister Russ Hinze put his huge weight behind the campaign, motivated partly or solely by self-interest in the form of succeeding Joh as premier. Hinze talked with his horseracing mate Andrew Peacock, who flirted with the Joh campaign as part of his continuing struggle with Howard for the Liberal leadership.

Finally there were the federal National MPs from Queensland. They were given the option of backing Joh and splitting the partyroom in Canberra or losing their preselections. One of the reluctant conscripts was Ray Braithwaite, an Opposition frontbencher.

"There were a few of us who thought at the time it was pretty futile," he said this week. "Of all the things I ever did in my political life, that is the one thing I regret. I should have said [to the Queensland party] to stick the whole lot."

Joh promised to start a bushfire, a rush of populism that would consume all who stood in its path. He never generated much more than a damp grassfire, with his best result a vote of 17 per cent and one seat in the Northern Territory election.

But he did cause a lot of carnage on the conservative side. Hawke called an early, midwinter election in 1987 to capitalise on the disarray in the Coalition and won with an increased majority. Despite a national swing of 1 per cent against Labor, it improved its vote by 1.6 per cent in Queensland and won four seats there. The Nationals' vote in Queensland dropped 2.8 per cent.

The Joh for PM campaign may have stopped Howard becoming prime minister nine years earlier than he did. Peter Walsh, finance minister in the Hawke government, has written that he believed in 1986 that Labor's defeat was almost inevitable. Given that Joh split the conservatives and made the Coalition take its eye off the policy ball, contributing to an unforced error in its tax policy ruthlessly exploited by treasurer Paul Keating, the Coalition performed remarkably well.

The election loss led to Peacock's coup against Howard in 1989, followed by the ill-starred experiments with John Hewson and Alexander Downer before the Liberals returned to Howard. It also saw Sinclair lose his job to young turk Charles Blunt before the Nationals got their act together under Tim Fischer.

But the experience also may have turned Howard into a more effective prime minister. He returned to the leadership with much improved internal management skills and a sharper political focus. The Joh madness reinforced the importance of unity, not taking anything for granted in politics and never succumbing to hubris.

As for Slipper, he was one of two Nationals, together with two Liberals, to lose their Queensland seats in the 1987 election. But that is just where the ironies begin. He reinvented himself as a Liberal and won his old Sunshine Coast seat of Fisher back in 1993.

In 1996, the decision of Joh's son John to run against him for the Nationals turned Slipper apoplectic. "We are supposed to be in the business of defeating Labor and presenting the Australian public with a strong united force as an alternative," he fumed.

Perhaps he should have thought of that on an earlier occasion. Slipper staved off the Bjelke-Petersen Jr challenge and was appointed whip and then parliamentary secretary by the leader once written off by Joh as "a silly little boy". But Howard dropped Slipper from the frontbench after the last election.

This week, there was a pilgrimage of friends and supporters to the bedside of the dying Joh. Slipper was not among them: he was out of contact on parliamentary work in Mongolia.