Van Badham and Karen Pickering
theguardian.com, Thursday 27 June 2013
Personal attacks, vicious insults, physical fights, backstabbing – Australian politicians have seen it all. Here are some of the worst examples
'Australian politicians have been committing acts of high bastardry against one another for years'. Photograph: Getty
Another day has passed in Australian politics, and, with it, the prime-ministerial career of Julia Gillard. To the outside world, the griping, carping, leaking and factional bloodbaths in the corridors of power may appear to herald a new era of dark malice on a continent famed for its sunshine.
Foreigners: please be aware that your sudden awareness of our political fistfights is but a Twitter phenomenon. Perhaps it's because the weather's good for fighting, because our nasal vernacular affords a brutal-sounding rhetoric, or because the white systems of government are built on a foundation of Aboriginal genocide and yet broil with angry guilt – but be assured Australian politicians have been committing acts of high bastardry against one another for years. Here is our top 10.
BILLY HUGHES V ALFRED DEAKIN (AND THE REST)
Billy Hughes. Photograph: Public domain
"Little Digger" Billy Hughes, Australia's seventh prime minister, can perhaps be identified as the founding father of Australian political bastardry. Despised for splitting from the Labor party while prime minister over the contentious issue of conscription for the first world war (he was in favour), Hughes's political adventurism began with seven years in colonial government, and proceeded over 51 more years in a federal parliamentary career. Ever the political survivor, Hughes knew little loyalty beyond his own ambition, and changed party membership five times: from Labor (1901–16) to National Labor (1916–17) to Nationalist (1917–30) to Australian (1930–31) to United Australia (1931–44) to Liberal (1944–52). Three parties expelled him, and he represented four different electorates in two states. He once allegedly used the floor of parliament to tell Australia's second prime minister, Alfred Deakin, that "at least Judas had the decency to hang himself!" resulting in cries of "dreadful! dreadful!" from the speaker of the house who collapsed in shock, and died, never regaining consciousness.
EARLE PAGE V ROBERT MENZIES
Earle Page. Photograph: naa.gov.au
The delightfully-monikered Page (one of his middle names is Christmas) is Australia's second-ever longest-serving parliamentarian (41 years) and entered parliament in 1919 in one of the smaller, agricultural-protectionist parties that eventually evolved into the Country party and thence the modern National party. Page became deputy prime minister in a coalition with the United Australia Party (UAP), which was led by Labor’s own Judas-du-jour, Joseph Lyons. When Lyons died suddenly in 1939, Page became caretaker prime minister for three weeks before the UAP promoted Robert Menzies to the leadership – a man Page loathed and refused to serve. His antipathy to Menzies reached its zenith in a vitriolic personal attack on his own coalition partner on the floor of parliament, where Page accused him not only of ministerial incompetence but of physical cowardice for failing to enlist in the first world war. The speech echoed around parliament for years and was frequently cited by Menzies' Labor nemesis, Eddie Ward.
EDDIE WARD V GOUGH WHITLAM
A firebrand of the militant trade union movement who rose in the Labor ranks through the tough 1930s, Eddie Ward's visceral opposition to Liberal leader Robert Menzies made his reputation, but it was his adversarial confrontations within his own party that sealed his fate. Believing himself to be the heir apparent to the Labor leadership after the death of Ben Chifley in 1951, he lost out to Doc Evatt and was devastated to lose again, to Arthur Calwell, in 1960. Denied also the consolation of the deputyship by the election of a young Gough Whitlam, Ward's resentment exploded; he attacked Whitlam in the party room. Calwell intervened, slipped and injured his knee, and Whitlam fled down the parliamentary corridor. Ward gave chase, but a pause to remove his glasses afforded Whitlam time to dash into his office, and Ward's fist connected only with the closed office door.
GOUGH WHITLAM V MALCOM FRASER (AND JOHN KERR)
Gough Whitlam. Photograph: nla.gov.au
Gough Whitlam might’ve thought that the Senate blocking his government’s supply in 1975 was a storm he could weather. After all, his short time as prime minister had been characterised not only by frenetic political activity and legislative change but scandal in the form of the Khemlani Affair and the more literal affair of Jim Cairns and Junie Morosi. But the governor general, John Kerr, had other ideas, and Fraser’s role in the Dismissal will never be forgiven by many who think Australian democracy died on the steps of Old Parliament House that day. He might be everyone’s favourite lefty uncle now, but in 1975 Malcolm Fraser cooperated with Kerr, helping to bring down an elected government, surely the biggest act of political bastardry in Australian history.
BILL HAYDEN V BOB HAWKE
Bill Hayden wasn’t a wildly charismatic or popular Labor leader but he had a strong factional base and was widely respected within the party. He’d also made a huge dent in Malcolm Fraser’s lead during the 1980 election and was poised to become the next prime minister of Australia. But the ALP was joseling to elevate a man with more raw charm than you could shake a stick at, who held records for drinking beer and won over everyone he met (except bosses, who didn’t care for him), former ACTU leader, Bob Hawke. After Hayden’s closest advisers convinced him to step aside for the good of the party, he famously noted the injustice by saying "a drover’s dog could lead the Labor Party to victory, the way the country is". He was right about the direction of the electoral wind but Hawke proved rather more popular than his canine comparison, going on to win elections with the kinds of polling and majorities politicians dream about and remaining a beloved national figure to this day. Hayden, of course, became a very effective governor general, disinclined to interfere in the affairs of parliament.
BOB HAWKE V PAUL KEATING
Bob Hawke. Photograph: nla.gov.au
The (first) Kirribilli Pact gave its name to later such bargains in the Australian political sphere, and earlier versions of the same must’ve passed between many leaders before 1988. With Keating snapping at his heels, Bob Hawke agreed to hand over the leadership without a fight, as long as Keating would support him through the 1991 election. The time to hand over the reins came and went, Keating challenged and lost, before heading to the backbench to lick his wounds and shore up the factional numbers needed for a successful spill. He got there in 1992 and Hawke took a long time to forgive his former protégé. Unlike Rudd though, he bowed out of parliament somewhat gracefully and seemed to spend a lot of time after this hanging out by the pool with Blanche. Keating would eventually lose the leadership of the country to Howard in 1996, in a defeat that few predicted would change the direction of the nation.
PAUL KEATING V PRETTY MUCH EVERYBODY
Paul Keating's official portrait. Photograph: Ming Xia/flickr
A political animal since, well, birth it seemed, the boiler-maker's brilliant son Paul Keating rose through the Labor ranks via neither the unions nor student politics but through policy mastery, political deftness and a volcano of verbal bastardry that erupted from his mouth like perpetual lava. Neither allies nor opponents were spared the man's infamous capacity for snark: he accused erudite Labor comrade Jim McClelland of "having swallowed a fucking dictionary", rebuffed Gough Whitlam's suggestion that he should attend university because "then I'd be just like you" and referred to the man he would depose, Bob Hawke, as "Old Silver" and "Old Jellyback", threatening to stick to him "like shit to a blanket" when Hawke proposed a too-generous tax concession to sport.
The best and worst of Keating was, of course, saved for the opposition. Peter Costello was "all tip and no iceberg", Andrew Peacock an "intellectual rust-bucket", and Wilson “Iron Bar” Tuckey a "stupid, foul-mouthed grub". He famously called his 1993 opponent John Hewson, "a feral abacus" with a performance "like being flogged with warm lettuce", and in saying "I want to do you slowly", delivered a taunt that still echoes in the dark corridors of the Australian political imagination. Keating may have lost the election to Howard in 1996 but one suspects that Keating's special brand of spoken bastardry will endure beyond any memory of Howard's words. What, after all, do a majority of votes matter, when your opponent has described you to history as a "mangy maggot", "the old desiccated coconut", "araldited to the seat" and a "dead carcass, swinging in the breeze"?
JOHN HOWARD V PETER COSTELLO
Poor old Peter Costello was a loyal subject, a treasurer who delivered everything he was asked, and a John Howard acolyte who formed part of the bedrock of Howard’s support within the party after the revolving-door leadership of the 1990s. Many hoped that a transition of leadership from Howard to Costello would arrest the breakneck speed towards the hard right on social (if not fiscal) policy and deliver fairer outcomes on everything from Reconciliation to the republic. But Howard and Hawke had something in common – an inability to prise their hands off the levers of power, and Costello was denied time (2001) after time (2004), despite a Kirribilli-style arrangement for transition. Howard reneged but instead of hitting the backchannels and building support for a challenge, Costello basically pouted, which Australians resented. His inability to connect with voters was compounded when it became clear he believed the leadership should be gift-wrapped rather than fought for. Who knows what the 2007 election might’ve held if Costello had stood up to his old mentor?
MALCOLM TURNBULL V TONY ABBOTT
When the most conservative leader the Liberal party has ever seen knifed one of the most progressive, there was only one vote in it. And Tony Abbott must’ve been overjoyed to discover he could saddle Turnbull with the most difficult and absurd portfolio to sell – opposing the hugely popular and globally applauded National Broadband Network (NBN). Cut to Turnbull grimacing his way through pressers ever since, as he tries to convince the Australian public that the Liberal plan would cost marginally less (or the same to householders) while dissembling around that old adage that you get what you pay for – or in this case, less than what we’ll pay for, with significantly less coverage, bandwidth and access for Australian internet users. The move has damaged Turnbull in the eyes of voters but as long as the Liberal party’s own faceless men support Abbott, it’s not the only thing neutralising Turnbull’s leadership ambitions.
JULIA GILLARD V KEVIN RUDD (PART ONE IN A SERIES)
Rudd and Gillard during gentler times. Photograph: Andrew Mears Pool/EPA
After the leadership carnage in the Labor party that followed the defeat of Keating by John Howard in 1996, many in the party and outside of it saw former diplomat Queenslander Kevin Rudd as Labor's shining, Mandarin-speaking, next big thing and delivered him a massive election victory that robbed the once-thought-invincible Howard of his own seat in 2007. But while Rudd's mastery of Mandarin was impressive, his interpersonal skills seemed to be vastly overrated. Despite his popularity in the electorate, Rudd infuriated any potential partners in the Senate, near everyone in his own caucus and even his personal staff with his narcissistic, arrogant style. After the failure of Rudd to pass an emissions trading scheme, caucus rolled him for his deputy, the cool-headed, professional negotiator, Julia Gillard.
She herself had more than a bit of prior in bastardry; a former member of Labor's socialist left faction, she split to lead her own faction in order to deal herself into power with the support of the right. We scarcely need tell you how this one ended.
