“Can Do” – The Campbell Newman Story

Gavin King is a journalist and former parliamentarian, as well as the author of Can Do, which charts the life of former Queensland premier Campbell Newman. The biography also merges Campbell Newman’s story with a broader discussion on the future of reform in Australia, as told to the author by some of the nation’s most prominent former and current politicians, business people and Newman himself. To discuss the rise and fall of the Newman Government, Gavin King joined his subject Campbell Newman to address The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 27 October 2015.

CAN DO” – THE CAMPBELL NEWMAN STORY

GAVIN KING

As a storyteller and journalist – who also made the leap over to the dark side as a politician in the Queensland parliament – the story of Campbell Newman presented a fascinating narrative featuring a complex character at its heart. I also saw merit in combining the history of his family, including his parents Kevin and Jocelyn who were both federal ministers, as well as the broader story of the reform challenge facing Australia.

And the more I interviewed Campbell and investigated his story, from his army and private sector career to his leap into politics as an unknown candidate for Lord Mayor of Brisbane and then Premier of Queensland, I saw his story as a cautionary tale about the personal perils of politics. Indeed, I have warned political candidates not to read the book until after their election is done in case they are scared off a tilt at politics. While there are some dark moments in Campbell’s political career, his story and that of his family is also an inspiring journey about having a go and doing your bit for your community and the nation. Ultimately, this book is a story about a family who put service above self.

When the LNP government Campbell and I were part of was turfed out of office in January 2015, we knew this book had to be written in short shrift to capture some of the raw emotion and unfiltered reactions of his time in politics. We needed to get it all on the page, the remarkable rise and the dramatic fall, without the caution and often glossed over version of the immediate history we had just experienced.

As a journalist who had written about governments and politicians for over a decade before becoming one myself, I can now safely say that I would treat politicians differently, and write accordingly. Having been on both sides of politics and the media, the interest in taking on this project was all about the human side of politics, the behind-the-scenes story that hadn’t been told about the political rise and fall of the popular, high achieving Lord Mayor and the controversial, reformist Premier, and the story of his parents and family who served the nation for a cumulative 40 years. As I write in the book, Campbell is a complex person, a unique leader, an anti-politician. I wanted to know how this bloke from very high political pedigree, who said he never wanted to be a politician, ultimately become one, and a very successful one at that.

So to an overview of Campbell’s varied careers. After finishing high school, Campbell followed his father into the army, and built a successful career over about a decade before entering what became a lucrative business career. It was in 1999, while attending his beloved father’s funeral, that he had an epiphany. He wanted to do more, to serve, to have more than “successful businessman” engraved on his tombstone. On the flight home from the funeral, he told his wife Lisa he wanted to serve in politics. A few years later, as a complete outsider, he ran for Lord Mayor of Brisbane, the biggest local government authority in the southern hemisphere, with over 600,000 voters. He won that election in 2004, and was wildly successful in the role, building billions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure and becoming Australia’s most popular capital city Lord Mayor.

Then the Brisbane floods came, that devastating natural disaster in January 2011. It was during another funeral, a couple of weeks after the floods, that Campbell made another fateful decision. This time he was going to make a run for Premier, from outside the parliament. It was an audacious move, it was crazy brave, and unprecedented in Australian politics.

But it is what happened after that decision to run for Premier that would come define his final years in politics. For the duration of the 12-month election campaign leading up to March 24, 2012, the Labor Party threw everything at Campbell, his wife Lisa and their extended family. It was the dirtiest campaign in Australian political history and it severely impacted him, and his family. Indeed, the pain of that campaign lasted for more than 12 months after the landslide win. There were days when Lisa couldn’t get out of bed. She should’ve sought professional help. She didn’t want to be in Parliament House, in the apartment allocated to the Queensland Premier. She felt physically uncomfortable being in there. It took them both a long time to come to terms with it, to move on. By then, his image, his persona, his caricature, had been set in stone.

As I wrote in the book, Labor may have lost the battle in 2012, but they would win the war in January 2015. When people inevitably ask “what went wrong” in the three short years between the biggest win in Australian political history in 2012 to an equally stunning loss in 2015, I point them in the direction of Chapter 7 of the book. It is in this chapter that the full extent of that damaging campaign is laid bare. This chapter is a story about how you take down a highly popular politician. The detail of that blueprint and that template executed by the Labor Party is, to me, the crux of the book. In a broader sense I believe that chapter explains what I believe is a great loss to Australian politics.

We all say we want our politicians to get things done, to make tough decisions, to act, to reform and fix and improve things. Given the myriad challenges facing our nation we need that type of politician and government action more than at any time in the past decade and more.

But as we examine in the final section of the book, the environment and the paradigm and the status quo within which politicians operate today makes it all but impossible to achieve any kind of meaningful, significant reform. Political leaders today appear to be rewarded for doing very little at all, as evidenced by the poll bounce gifted to the current Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk.

As I highlight in the book, Milton Friedman described the tyranny of the status quo more than 30 years ago. Friedman identified that reform was nigh on impossible in the face of the so-called Iron Triangle, which included vested interests, the bureaucracy, and the career politicians. In the book, I venture that conviction politicians today face an even greater challenge of reform than the one identified by Friedman all those decades ago. Because apart from vested interests – the unions are a key example today – and the bureaucracy and career politicians, today’s leader must also deal with the ever-changing, shape-shifting media landscape, both mainstream media and social media.

It’s not just about the difficulty in getting a message out. It goes well beyond that. It’s the distortion, the bias, the bite-sized chunks, the journalists choosing emotion and feelings over thought and reason, the 7-second TV news grab, the 140-character tweet, the Facebook post that goes viral in the blink of an eye. There’s an old saying that a lie can travel half way around the world before the truth has a chance to put its shoes on. That quote is believed to be around 200 years old, but is more relevant today than at any point since it was first written. Every gaffe, every eye wink, every misplaced word in a sentence is magnified, amplified and serialised in an instant, and it sticks – that perception becomes reality very, very quickly – and it’s what people believe and repeat and pass on to their friends. And that’s an important point to make about social media. Research shows that people increasingly get their news from social media, rather than traditional journalism and media outlets, and they will trust what their Facebook friends say about a certain politician or issue more than any of those mainstream media outlets or commentators say.

While this is my, and to a large degree Campbell’s, assessment of the current climate and environment afflicting politics, my great worry is for my generation, those under 40. After 20 years of uninterrupted economic growth, young people – and I speak in general terms here – have little sense of perspective or ability to analyse, no sense of history, no inkling to look beyond an internet meme or funny gif or digital smackdown of a politician. Increasingly, they are also voting Green, with little idea of the economic and budgetary consequences of their vote.

So what’s the answer, in this face of this inexorable challenge of reform? Perhaps it’s Malcolm Turnbull. Maybe it’s Mike Baird. If live tweeting the Bachelor or smiling while taking a selfie is the answer to having common sense leaders remain in power, well, so be it. I don’t think we’ll get the reform and action this country needs, but maybe those days are over. As Paul Kelly recently wrote in The Australian, “The days of ‘big bang’ reform in this country are gone. Gradual reform is better than no reform.”

And that, unfortunately, is the opposite of what Campbell Newman did in his time in politics. As I wrote in the book, Campbell was the “right man for a tough job at the wrong time”. He led the most reformist state government since Kennett in Victoria some 20 years ago. Queensland wasn’t ready for the pace and breadth of his reform and action, and Australia isn’t ready for that style of leadership and government either.

So what hope is there for reform into the future? Well to conclude I return to the wisdom of Milton Friedman whom I quote at the end of the book:

Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.

My great aim in writing the book is that over time it will show that the actions of the Newman Government, the dedication to service of his family and the ideas about reforming the Federation, the bureaucracy, service delivery and the media will become “politically inevitable”.