The “Joh for Canberra” Political Drama – what really happened?

From 1983 to 1992, Davey was the National Party’s federal director and has written widely on the party’s history. In his new book, Joh for PM, Paul Davey tells the story of the disastrous 1987 campaign to install Sir Joh (knighted in 1984) as Australia’s prime minister, which split the federal Coalition and left a trail of political wreckage and mistrust from which the Nationals would take more than two decades to recover. Paul Davey addressed The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 15 July 2015 to discuss the legacy of the Joh for PM campaign.

THE “JOH FOR CANBERRA” POLITICAL DRAMA – WHAT REALLY HAPPENED?

PAUL DAVEY       

One question I imagine some of you will have is – why has it taken nearly 30 years for this book to materialise? It’s a fair question.

When I was federal director of the National Party, during the Joh for PM campaign, I found it necessary as events unfolded to start building a file of all relevant details – newspaper clippings, transcripts of interviews, copies of minutes, correspondence, diary notes, and so on. It was necessary because I was being telephoned at all times of day and night by party members, candidates and journalists, and I had to be as up-to-date with events as possible.

Believe me, events did unfold extremely quickly. The media loved the story because it was controversial, revealing growing disunity within the National Party, at state and federal levels, and within the federal Coalition Opposition. Keeping track of it all was made more difficult by the fact that the Queenslanders wouldn’t tell anyone in Canberra what they were doing.

We had to rely on the newspapers, radio and television. There were no 24-hour on-line news services, no social media, no Google, no Facebook or Tweets, no email and no mobile phones. These were the days of landline phones, telexes and fax machines. By the end of 1987, when the Joh campaign was over, my file of paperwork filled several boxes.

It was then that I realised I had the makings of a manuscript. I worked on it over the coming couple of years and in the early 1990s cast around for a publisher – with no success; which was hardly surprising because, looking back on the document, it was more of a day-by-day chronology, filled with long slabs of verbatim transcripts; not very appealing to a reader.

So back it all went into the boxes, and up they went into the attic – largely forgotten until Clive Palmer declared in April 2013 that he was forming a political party and would become prime minister. That brought the whole Joh campaign back into focus. I dug out the old files and basically started all over again. And I found that nearly 30 years down the track the Joh campaign was still a relevant issue. It stood out as a major event in Australian political history and it remained as an event that was well remembered by those who are interested in politics and who were voters at the July 1987 federal election.

It’s interesting how you can find yourself in a conversation with a group of people and if the subject turns to politics someone will say “Do you remember Joh for PM?” The subject invariably evokes a lively discussion and many people still have very clear views about it: either Joh was mad and the whole campaign was mad, or Joh was right and the National Party’s federal leader, Ian Sinclair, should have got behind him.

There has been quite a bit written about the Joh campaign – saturation in the media at the time and in articles and columns since then. Where this book, Joh for PM, is different, is that it contains detail that has not previously been published, or that has perhaps not fully been understood or appreciated.

I knew Joh Bjelke-Petersen quite well, having been the Brisbane reporter for the ABC radio programs, AM and PM, from 1974 to 1977. We had a good professional relationship. Joh knew that AM and PM could give him immediate nation-wide coverage and I knew that if I got an interview with him, it was almost guaranteed to get a run.

When I was transferred to take over the Canberra bureau for the programs, Joh put on a small farewell party and presented me with a lovely Queensland cedar cuff link box with the State coat of arms on the lid – a momento that I still have to this day. So it was with some sadness that I found myself ten years later pitted against the Queensland Premier over the Joh for PM campaign.

You have to remember the political atmosphere at that time. Joh had won the Queensland election in 1983 and was able to form government in his own right thanks to the defection of two Liberals. Prior to that, the Nationals had been the majority party in state Coalition governments with the Liberal Party for the previous 15 years.

Towards the end of 1986, against all the predictions of opinion polls and political pundits, the National Party government was returned entirely in its own right. Joh was the stand-out conservative leader in Australia.

Meanwhile, the Hawke Labor government in Canberra had become increasingly unpopular, especially in regional Australia. But the Coalition opposition of John Howard and Ian Sinclair was regarded by many to be a hangover from the Fraser/Anthony years and simply not good enough.

There was open leadership tension in the Liberal Party between John Howard and Andrew Peacock, and an increasing number of people, some of them influential, were aligning themselves with a growing New Right movement and telling Joh that he should be leading the country. And so the seeds were sown.

Joh’s campaign really kicked off when he addressed a rally in Wagga, in the New South Wales Riverina, on 31 January 1987 and pledged to introduce a 25 cents in the dollar single rate of tax with no off-setting indirect taxes. He further declared that unless sitting federal National and Liberal Party members and senators supported his policies, one of his own candidates would stand against them at the next election.

Then the Queensland National Party’s governing body, its central council of around 250 delegates from across the state, met in Hervey Bay at the end of February 1987 and threw the weight of the entire Queensland party behind what the resolution described as “the move by Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen to attain the Prime Ministership …”. It continued by committing all party members, parliamentary and organisational, to the cause, which it said could be appropriately styled “Joh for PM for Australia’s sake”.

Moreover, it proposed the establishment of Joh for PM committees and sub-committees in all states, and set out a formula that would break the federal Coalition.

Needless to say, what became known as the Hervey Bay resolutions caused consternation in Canberra, not the least because they threatened Coalition stability at a time when opinion polls were consistently putting the opposition ahead of the Hawke government. And, of course, any campaign by Joh to become prime minister put him on a collision course with both Sinclair and Howard.

The threat to run Joh candidates in states beyond Queensland caused major problems with the National parties in New South Wales and Victoria. Each state National Party is its own independent entity, operating under its own constitution. And those constitutions preserved the right of the relevant state parties to determine in which seats they would run candidates and to conduct pre-selections for those candidates.

There was no problem with the National parties in South Australia or Western Australia, because they fundamentally supported Joh policies and ambitions. Nonetheless, Queensland was threatening to walk over the inter-state party constitutions. Joh even announced in April 1987 that he had formed a new political organisation, the New Nationals.

In short, what developed was a kind of trench warfare that ebbed and flowed on a daily basis; that broke the federal Coalition for 100 days from 28 April 1987; and that prompted Bob Hawke to call an early double dissolution election for 11 July 1987, which he won, giving Labor a record third consecutive term in office.

Trying to co-ordinate that election campaign with the state National parties became a nightmare. The Queenslanders wanted no federal campaign material circulated in their state. Sinclair retaliated by instructing that federal advertising be booked directly with Queensland regional newspapers, and he campaigned in the state on four occasions.

Joh insisted that he, not Sinclair, would deliver the election policy speech. Sinclair said that would never be on. Even after Joh announced on 3 June that he would not personally contest the election, there were still Joh Nationals candidates in the field.

The Queensland organisation supported Senate teams and House of Representatives candidates in all electorates in South Australia and Western Australia. And there were Joh candidates running against Sinclair and his deputy, Ralph Hunt, as well as the Liberal Member for Hume, Wal Fife, all in New South Wales, and also against National MPs, Bruce Lloyd and Peter Fisher, in Victoria.

The New South Wales party was adamantly opposed to the Joh campaign and maintained what it described as a de facto Coalition agreement with the state Liberal Party, thereby ensuring a joint Senate team. Importantly, the New South Wales position denied Joh any chance of mounting a truly nation-wide campaign. Had New South Wales gone along with the Joh campaign, Victoria would have joined as well, thereby ensuring uniformity among all state party organisations, and leaving Ian Sinclair with little option but to also fall in line.

But it didn’t happen, and the war of words continued throughout the election campaign, with Joh saying Sinclair was a loser and predicting that he would lose the leadership after the election.

It’s hard, if not impossible, to find any other federal election campaign in which powerful people on the same side of politics were publicly critical of their federal leader. Yet that’s what happenedp. The South Australians and the Western Australians came close to clinching a Senate seat each, but in the end failed to do so.

Perhaps the most surprising fact was that the party did not lose more seats. It lost two, both in Queensland, but it gained a senator from Victoria and also one from the CLP in the Northern Territory, so its total party room strength remained at 26.

This story draws on a lot of information that has not previously been public – transcripts and minutes of internal meetings, correspondence, and interviews with key players. It covers the strategies and counter-strategies of the opposing camps, the intrigue as events unfolded, and the actions taken after the Joh campaign to reunite the party at all state and federal levels.

The Page Research Centre, which is an organisation similar to the Menzies and Curtin foundations, and which is named after one of the Country Party’s founding fathers, Sir Earle Page, supported the publication of the book by NewSouth Publishing, which I gratefully acknowledge.

The Page Centre has on its website, for those who are really keen on fine detail, the full text of several documents referred to in the manuscript, including an interesting paper that Joh left at the Queensland National Party’s annual conference in Townsville in 1987 giving his analysis of the campaign. These documents can be found at www.page.org.au

I thank my publisher, Elspeth Menzies, and her team at NewSouth for doing a wonderful job of design and production. Elspeth and I have collaborated on three books now, and she is truly a great person to work with.

Joh for PM was a torrid time, a significant episode in Australian politics, and undoubtedly the most divisive event in the 95-year history of the federal National Party.

Ultimately, the position that Ian Sinclair took maintained the National Party as we knew it then, and as we still know it now, nearly 30 years down the track. Some may say the party should have been changed, that Joh could have wrenched it into a new era of direction and policy. But ever since its foundation federally as the Australian Country Party in January 1920 it has been a specialist party concentrating on the interests of rural industries and regional communities.

That role would have changed if the Joh campaign had succeeded and a new broad-based, single conservative organisation established.

I believe there is still a need for a specialist regional party in Australian politics and the National Party is best positioned to continue fulfilling that role.