Nick Greiner – A Political Life

Nick Greiner came into office as Premier of New South Wales in 1988, wanting to do more than change lifestyles, win re-election and remain popular, and he proceeded to implement a wide-ranging and enduring transformation of what he called “NSW Inc.”. To many, Greiner’s untimely end as premier leaves many questions. Ian Hancock, historian and biographer, has now produced a biography of Nick Greiner, Nick Greiner – A Political Life which describes and explains Greiner’s life in politics, the story of someone who made a difference and yet who, being a manager and strategist rather than a conventional politician, contributed to his own undoing. Ian Hancock addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 10 September 2013.

NICK GREINER – A POLITICAL LIFE

IAN HANCOCK

Some years ago, prompted by Ainsley Gotto who had been John Gorton’s former Private Secretary, I approached Nick Greiner with a proposal to write his biography. It seemed to me that, apart from one major analysis published in 1995, and a number of chapters and commentaries, there was a great gap in recent NSW political history, namely, a study of the man who tried to make a real difference as State Premier and who largely succeeded in doing so.

The gap would not have existed if Nick Greiner had been a Labor Premier. Perhaps, however, he just missed the point.

Former Senator Mark Arbib wrote in the “Foreword” to Troy Bramston’s edited book on the Wran years that Neville Wran had shown how, in addition to balancing budgets and running trains on time, State government “could be fun … could uplift our horizons” and could be “dazzling”. Perhaps Greiner’s misfortune was to understand that balancing budgets in NSW, especially in the context of the recession of the late 1980s, was actually a major exercise.

There was also the matter of debt. It did not seem like fun, or an opportunity for razzle and dazzle, when confronted with debt liabilities of $46bn and the prospect of taking 315 years to pay them off. Given that in 1988 State Rail was losing $1bn a year, Greiner was probably right in thinking there was more to managing trains than getting the timetables right. This was certainly true, if you took into account the union rorts in State Rail.

Bruce Baird, the Minister for Transport in the Greiner Government, found that in Narrandera, in the south-west of the State, eleven staff were employed to drive non-existent trains, three more were paid to drive the drivers to these non-existent trains, six staff sold tickets to just five passengers, and six more staff were employed to relieve these ticket-sellers.

Nick Greiner was determined to eliminate absurdities of this kind. More than that, he wanted to change the management and governance of what he called NSW Incorporated (NSW Inc.). Unlike other post-war premiers of NSW, he came into office with a wide-ranging program of reform. He set out to make “NSW Inc.” more accountable, efficient and honest. He initiated or presided over radical and lasting changes to financial management, to the structure and culture of the public service, and to industrial relations, education, and transport.

Nick Greiner promoted the corporatisation and, in a few cases, the privatisation of government trading enterprises, advanced the cause of open government and budget honesty, and attacked corruption, principally by forming ICAC. The political standard-bearer in Australia for pursuing micro-economic reform, Greiner supported Bob Hawke’s “New Federalism” as a means of improving Australia’s competitive position in world markets, and was instrumental in the formation of the Council of Australian Governments.

Most of Greiner’s reforms have been accepted, followed and built upon by governments of different persuasions throughout Australia. All, as he pointed out, were “mugged by reality”. It is true that he was just part of a broader movement, taking place across the developed and even the developing world. The fact remains: Greiner initiated or presided over, created or extended, the momentum for change in NSW and, never parochial, sought to advance this cause throughout Australia.

But his approach and his language was that of the manager, not the ideologue. The Left, partly for its own purposes, wrongly depicted him as some sort of mad monk. The true believers in the right-wing think tanks, who never had to face elections, discovered he was too slow and too soft in promoting their agendas. They were disturbed to find that the self-styled managing director of “NSW Inc.” relied more heavily on “applied commonsense” than dogma.

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In writing about Nick Greiner, however, I did not see my principal task as one of recounting the story of a government or, for that matter, of contributing to the history of the Liberal Party. My objective was to write about an unusual politician who came from what, in terms of the Liberal Party, was an unusual background – that is, Catholic and non-Anglo or Celtic.

It was soon apparent to me that Greiner’s motivations, habits of mind and methods of operation were formed well before he became Premier. It was also apparent that his personal and political life was marked by paradox and contradiction, and that key mistakes emanated in part from the very qualities, which made him a very different yet successful head of government.

To tell this story it was necessary to go back to October 1944, to Bratislava, in what was then Czechoslovakia. The woman who became Nick’s mother, and whose first husband had been killed by the Nazis, had just been denounced as a Jew. She was taken to a concentration camp in northern Germany. Originally a labour camp, Ravensbrück acquired gassing facilities in late 1944, and some 5,000 inmates were murdered before Soviet troops arrived in April 1945. Clare Redlinger survived, possibly because German was one of her many languages.

At the end of the War she married Miklós Greiner a fourth generation timber merchant, whose family business in Budapest had begun another revival after the experience of two world wars, a Communist takeover in 1919 and a depression. But the Greiners soon became victims of another Communist persecution. Miklós was interrogated for weeks in Budapest by members of the so-called “Economical Section” of the State Police whose job was to hound the “class enemy”. At least Clare and her 18 month-old son, Nick, managed to escape to Vienna in November 1948.

Nick’s father was not so fortunate. His attempts to leave Hungary were continually thwarted. On one occasion, Soviet troops intervened and shot dead the man sitting next to him in the escape truck. Another escape plan almost failed because the paid people smuggler overslept. There would be further trials and tribulations before the family of three reached Australia in 1951.

Nick’s European background is important to the story, first, paradoxically, because he knew little about it until well after he entered state politics. His parents were determined that he and his younger brother would grow up thoroughly assimilated into Australia. For the sake of their sons, they wanted their own past to remain another country.

Knowing and caring nothing about cricket did not stop his parents from feeling immensely proud when Nick became a junior member of the Sydney Cricket Ground Trust (he remains a member to this day). So far as they were concerned, their elder son had been “admitted to something quintessentially Australian”. Secondly, the survivors of Nazism and Communism brought with them all the elements necessary for them to be, in Nick’s words, the classic migrant family “who made good”.

In his history of the country he left when the Soviet Union crushed the 1956 uprising, Ivan Volgyes reproduced an oft-repeated “definition” of his fellow Hungarians: A Hungarian, he wrote, is “[s]omeone who goes in the revolving door after you and comes out ahead of you”.

Miklós Greiner was the perfect example of someone who, often against heavy odds, usually managed to come out first. Within a fortnight of arriving in Sydney he won a contract to supply timber to the NSW railways. His ability to meet the order within a week, for what was then scarce material, gave him the start for what became a very profitable business, the White River Corporation.

Clare Greiner was also a perfect “New Australian”, managing the progress of her sons, and keeping watch by involving herself in the prestigious Catholic schools they attended.

So this story begins with a boy and a young man who inherited, among other things, a work ethic, a drive to succeed and a disregard for unfavorable odds. To this inheritance must be added Nick’s innate intellectual gifts and competitive spirit which meant coming top or near the top of everything he attempted throughout his formal education.

He was by no means a diligent student; just, in his own words, “a diligent achiever of exam results”. Significantly, for his future, he was “driven” in another respect. When Nick Greiner left Riverview in 1963, weighed down by prizes, he also took with him a record as the outstanding debater and public speaker of his year.

At Sydney University he just missed out on a first, which some in the Economics faculty thought he deserved. He did, however, top his year, leaving the young John Hewson trailing well behind with a lower second. Arriving at the Harvard Business School in 1968, he was perhaps the youngest and certainly among the least prepared of the 700 students in his class. Yet he graduated in 1970 as one of 19 Baker Scholars, the exceptional achievers; in fact, with his High Distinction, he was placed in the upper half of them.

Of all the early external influences on young Nick, the Harvard experience was critical. For a start, although in his first year the course method required him to be a diligent student working up to 70 hours a week, his letters home also demonstrate how he managed to sample so much of life outside the school walls. The well-rounded Sydney boy became an even more well-rounded and adventurous young adult.

More importantly, the case method of the Business School confirmed and expanded his modes of thought which would determine his approach to politics and government and, as it does now, to business. At Harvard he was trained to look at options and make evidence-based decisions, to embrace change and be willing to take risks, to focus on outcomes rather than processes, to think and act strategically, and to seek what was feasible above what was ideologically consistent or desirable.

Nick Greiner who left Harvard recognised he had been through a “mind forming” rather than “knowledge forming” experience.

The Nick Greiner who left Harvard recognised he had been through a “mind forming” rather than “knowledge forming” experience. Forty years later Greiner recalled how the Business School had “inculcated a strong, rational approach to everything” and “taught us not to show emotion”.

He picked up another idea, which was reinforced when working for a major corporation in Idaho in 1970-72. The corporation’s president, a graduate of the Harvard Business School, employed scores of the brightest “young tigers” (as he called them) from the top American business schools and put them in charge of individual areas. The newly-anointed Baker Scholar, a middle-level executive at aged 23, could make and implement major decisions. As the MD of NSW Inc., Greiner adopted the same approach. He, too, believed that you should let the managers manage. It would become his mantra.

Clearly, there were other external factors, outside of direct politics, helping Nick Greiner on his way to the premiership. One was his choice of spouse. In 1970, partly I suspect on her initiative, he married Kathryn Callaghan, a feisty and spirited young woman of Irish stock, who provided missing social skills, captivated those with whom he had to deal, and stood by him in every crisis.

Then there were the contacts in the private sector who shared his interest in micro-economic reform and his belief that governmental systems would benefit from an infusion of private sector values and practices. Gary Sturgess was a significant influence. He joined Greiner’s staff in 1983 and headed the Cabinet Office during the Greiner premiership. A libertarian and more of an ideologue than Greiner, Sturgess was an inexhaustible source of ideas. He delivered many of the arguments and the words of what became known as “Greinerism”, and was at once Greiner’s closest confidante and someone he could not afford – politically – to follow all of the time.

Soon after Nick Greiner entered politics in 1980, and became Leader of the Opposition in 1983 and Premier in 1988, he brought with him a number of defining personal characteristics: 1)an innate rationality and commonsense; 2) a strong sense of self–belief which accompanied an apparent shyness; 3) a pride in his own integrity and a calmness under pressure. He liked to reason with those who held opposed views rather than impose his will; to his advantage, and to his detriment, he did not have the mongrel of a Keating or a Kennett.

But how serious was he about a political career? Aged 15, Nick Greiner told a school friend that one day he would be Prime Minister of Australia. Aged 22 and while at Harvard, he told Tom Hughes QC, who had just been appointed Attorney-General in the Gorton Government, that he had long-term plans for entering politics. His Harvard contemporaries were convinced that Nick intended to go into politics. They observed how, if he set a goal, he usually achieved it. Dave Zimmer, his American room mate said that, with Nick, “politics were there from the start”.

Yet Nick often liked to say that he only went into politics because his father, whose authority he respected and whose direction he accepted, would not allow the Harvard graduate to manage the White River Corporation on his own terms. The Business School frowned upon the “European way” of doing business through deals and bartering. Moreover, Miklós Greiner had no immediate plans for letting his manager manage, let alone for ceding control White River to his son.

Games of squash and politics provided useful diversions in the 1970s. Nick was rarely beaten in the one and became very active in the other. He held various middle-level positions in the Liberal Party in 1970s, having sought federal pre-selection as early as 1973. I think his claims to have become a politician by default or by accident probably do not withstand close scrutiny.

But what really matters is that Nick projected an image of himself as a non-politician. He set out to be different: 1) he was prepared to admit mistakes; 2) he was disarmingly honest; 3) he was able to engage in self-mockery, 4) he was ready to acknowledge publicly the good points of his opponents; and, above all, 5) he could present himself as someone primarily concerned about the better management of NSW.

He was also given to public confessions – including one in 1984 that modesty was not his greatest virtue. It suited his preferred image that he did not take the political game at all seriously and that he was not much good at it anyway. The Liberal Party agreed with him.

After Greiner almost lost the unlosable state election of 1991, an internal report, written largely by Joe Hockey, then President of the Young Liberals, criticised him directly and indirectly for his failures as a politician over the previous three years and for his election campaign strategy. Typically, Greiner had approached the election with what now might be regarded as a strange idea: he refused to engage in a negative campaign focused on the weaknesses of his opponents. Unwisely, he simply dismissed Bob Carr’s arguments as “nonsense”, not worthy of attention. Nick Greiner, the strategic thinker, thought that the electorate would recognise and endorse good policy.

Nick Greiner’s approach to politics received its strongest support from those most involved in implementing his reform programs. Senior public servants openly admired him. Percy Allan, the Treasury Secretary, observed how Greiner “didn’t put politics before evidence-based policy . . . it was always a case of what’s the problem, how do we solve it, and then how do we sell it.”

Yet Nick did make populist decisions while Premier. He baulked, for example, at cutting expenditure precisely his first attempt to do so receive a savage response. And, if he was a non-politician of sometimes poor political judgment, it may be asked how he remained the unchallenged leader of a major party for nine years, restored its morale and numbers after two devastating “Wranslides”, won two elections, and presided authoritatively over a working Coalition government.

This achievement was all the more remarkable considering that Nick Greiner was in many ways an outsider in the Liberal Party: in addition to being a Catholic and non-Anglo, he often repudiated or ignored, or was simply ignorant of, the party’s core beliefs and conventions. In the lead-up to the 1988 election, for example, Nick and his business friends outside the Party, and his personal staff, ran and, in part financed, their own campaign. Ted Pickering, who led the party moderates at the time, thought that Greiner had inherited nothing from the Liberal Party gene pool. He by-passed the party’s conventions and rules which prescribed that the organisation had the exclusive responsibility for raising and spending of funds, and for managing election campaigns.

Greiner regarded the party organisation as mostly hopeless. He was contemptuous of the State Director, who was close to John Howard, and the widely-revered John Carrick, the former General Secretary who was charged with upholding the party’s rules and conventions.

State Director Graeme Starr, he claimed, was “a weak flunky”, unable to “execute and implement”, “a bit of a naysayer”, “rule-bound” and with “a limited strategic perspective”. Starr’s alleged vices were those the Harvard Business School wanted its graduates to jettison. One of its distinguished graduates, who focused so firmly on outcomes, effectively sacked a Director he saw as obsessed with process.

Bob Carr, who knows a bit about politics, considers Nick Greiner to have been a textbook Leader of the Opposition and an astute political premier. The Liberal Party had tried for 30 years to make inroads into the ethnic communities. It never got much further than winning the approval of refugees from the Captive Nations. As Carr noted, Nick Greiner had a natural access to ethnic groups and successfully worked his connections while assuming the portfolio of Ethnic Affairs in his government.

In 1988, Greiner stood out against Howard over the issues of multiculturalism and the rate of Asian immigration. Later, he bucked Howard and other Federal Liberals by openly supporting a republic. Greiner always made it clear that becoming “quintessentially Australian” did not require him to accept all the baggage of Old Australia.

Nick’s major political mistake was to sanction his former minster Terry Metherell’s appointment to a public service job. Reflecting his commitment to educational reform, and to letting the managers manage, he had left Metherell in a portfolio where the damage to the government kept mounting. Obliged to resign because of a tax problem, Metherell repaid Greiner’s loyalty, and the Premier’s failure to restore him to the ministry after the May 1991 election, by resigning from the Liberal Party and sitting as an Independent.

Metherell’s action created further problems for Greiner in the Legislative Assembly where the Coalition had lost its own majority in the 1991 election. Metherell felt unfulfilled on the cross benches and, when he signaled a desire to leave politics, two remaining friends in the Liberal Party sought to find him alternative employment. Tim Moore, the Minister for the Environment, found an opening in his department. Satisfied that Metherell was eminently qualified for the job, Greiner agreed to sanction an appointment which would enable the Liberal Party to reclaim Metherell’s safe seat on the North Shore.

Nick Greiner had never given any thought to how such an appointment could be made. The strategic thinker left the details of implementation to others. The managers could be left to manage them. At the last moment, a question was raised about the application of Greiner’s own Public Sector Management Act, which laid down an advertised and merit-selection process for making appointments in the Public Service. Dick Humphry, the Director-General of the Premier’s Department, advised Greiner at an early morning 20-minute meeting that there was a way of dealing with this “snag”.

Another public servant, one of the old school, might well have said: “Premier, this a courageous decision. It might be in your interest to reflect upon the political implications of what you are doing. Perhaps we might meet again after lunch.” But characteristically, Greiner, who had not consulted the political hard heads, saw no problem. Confident that he was proceeding lawfully, he insisted on action.

Ian Temby of the ICAC later commented that “all hell broke loose” when the Metherell appointment was announced in April 1992. Temby subsequently found Greiner, and Tim Moore, guilty of corrupt conduct within the meaning of the ICAC legislation Greiner himself had introduced. The moral guardians – the media, the other Independents, and the Labor Party (whose record Temby had decided not to investigate) – reached for their copies of Thesaurus.

One editorialist in a short paragraph described Greiner as “a man of withered personal and political judgment and bloated self-delusion”, as guilty of “Olympian hypocrisy” and “ethical blindness”, who had engaged in a “desperate and devious ploy” which was either “brazen, ludicrous or pathetic”. Not surprisingly, that editorial appeared in the Melbourne Age.

In the broad scheme of things, Greiner, the non-politician, had merely applied a variation on conventional NSW politics. The trouble was that he had promised to be different. At worst, as Bob Hawke said, he had been foolish.

From this distance, the corruption charge, the public outcry and Greiner’s resignation seem wildly out of proportion, especially considering the recent actions of some of Labor’s finest in NSW. The irony was that Greiner thought he was answering Liberal Party criticism by being more “political”. He just chose the wrong way and the wrong time for being so. As he often remarked, he suffered most when he was not being true to himself.

At a personal level, the striking feature throughout this drama was that Nick Greiner remained focused on what he thought actually mattered. The policy-oriented Premier was working his way through dozens of issues without practising micro-management and submerging himself in the related detail. At most, for him, the Metherell appointment was a side issue.

Temby genuinely shocked him by concluding that Greiner had taken charge of the Metherell appointment. The Harvard graduate did not recognise in himself the central role which Temby had detected. Abandoned by senior Liberals, Nick was forced out of politics to save the government and before the Court of Appeal cleared his name. Unbowed, he started another successful career, this time in business, in what he called his “afterlife”, to which he applied the same Harvard habits of mind. Mercifully, unlike some former politicians, he did not suffer from relevance deprivation, and thus feel moved to lecture us on every issue of the day.

Enoch Powell once claimed that “all political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure”. Greiner’s may have been cut off at a very unhappy juncture but nothing can diminish what he achieved. Besides, he did have another full life ahead of him and, being his father’s and his mother’s son, he managed to assign most of the past to another country.