WRITING ABOUT PAUL RAMSAY

Angela Shanahan – columnist with The Australian – has written the biography of Paul Ramsay, founder of Ramsay Health which has been published as Paul Ramsay – A Man For Others. In a lasting legacy, Paul Ramsay bequeathed funds to establish the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation which will operate through the University of Queensland, Wollongong University and the Australian Catholic University. At The Sydney Institute, on Wednesday 7 October 2020, The Hon Tony Abbott joined with Angela Shanahan to launch Paul Ramsay – A Man For Others. They reflected on Paul Ramsay’s unique personality and commercial approach which built a formidable and lasting enterprise to benefit the global community.

WRITING ABOUT PAUL RAMSAY

ANGELA SHANAHAN

Thank you very much Tony for those rather effusive words. I hope that people enjoy reading this book. I didn’t want to write a hagiography but Paul was so well loved that it was very difficult to find anyone who would say anything bad about him. So, I just want to say a few things.

First of all, why did I write this book? I was commissioned to write the book by Peter Evans, the accountant at Ramsay Health Care and who knew Paul from the 1960s, and Tony Clark, a great friend of John Howard and chairman of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation. When I was commissioned, I knew nothing about Paul Ramsay. I hadn’t even heard of him. In hindsight, that’s quite a good place to come from for a biographer because, if you know nothing, you haven’t got any prejudices about your subject, and you hear a lot of different views.

And it was one of the most interesting things about Paul that every single person I spoke with, and I did it all from interviews, thought they knew Paul Ramsay; they really knew him. He was their best friend. He was everybody’s best friend. He was a person of contrasts, you might say. It was not easy to pin him down because so many different people thought they knew him. He was very effusive and he loved a party, because he loved having people around. At the same time, he had a rather shy quality, a rather reticent quality. He was somewhat insecure, I believe. When you are focusing on a single person, you can’t help wondering where all this came from.

I started at the beginning. His sister, his twin, was very helpful. They grew up in a milieu that was completely foreign to me but I managed to somehow put myself in their position. Perhaps helped because I have a lot of children, I don’t know. Paul Ramsay went to boarding school at the age of five. The Ramsay twins were the youngest. In lots of ways, Paul was the younger of the twins because his sister mothered him a bit. From there, of course, he went to the Jesuits and he loved the company. He loved being one of the boys. He wanted desperately to be one of the boys. But one of the things about Paul was that he wasn’t very good at a lot of the camaraderie boy stuff. He was rather insecure.

He tended to become, in a sense, the class fool. As time went on, he was not at all academic. He got through the Leaving (Year 11) and managed to get into university. But his life didn’t seem to be going anywhere. He came from a very old colonial family. His grandfather was one of the founders of Canberra. His grandfather chose the site of Canberra. And he desperately wanted to live up to the family heritage. But everyone was doing business and making money – and they had money, the family weren’t poor. As Michael Siddle once said, “The trouble with you Paul is that you were brought up in the gutters of Point Piper.” Paul had elevated ideas of the way things should be. But he wasn’t doing anything much for himself. Time went on, time went on.

He tried all sorts of things. He tried selling real estate since his father was a well known developer; a big flop. The thing that got him going was a seminar on the Carnegie method – how to win friends and influence people. When I heard about this, I realised it was obviously the formative thing in his life. He said it over and over again, “This was the thing that taught me how to get on.” He was instinctive. Carnegie showed him how to understand the other person. As Tony said, you never do a deal where the other person comes out of feeling he’d been diddled. That was what got him into the idea of business.

Many people have asked me if Paul Ramsay was interested in hospitals because it was people kind of thing. I would say partly yes. But that’s not how he got started in the hospital business, not at all. In fact, the story of how he got started in the hospital business was sheer serendipity. I’ll just read a little bit here from the prologue which is about how Paul actually got started.

In 1964, the attempts of 25 year-old aspiring property developer Paul Ramsay to break into the world of business seemed destined to fizzle out ? . He’d recently bought Warrina House, a somewhat dilapidated guest house in Mosman owned by three old ladies. They wanted £17,000 for it but at auction it was passed in at £16,000, a price they’d unwisely not accepted. Eventually, Paul had bought the house at almost half the initial asking price, which, as he later remarked, only goes to show the truth of my dad’s principle that you should always go with the auction price as the real price.

At the time, he thought he’d done a very clever deal. Surely, he thought this purchase would give him the edge he needed to be taken seriously as a developer, a real businessman. But he had no vision for the old guest house aside from the potential of its land development.

Paul’s family were in the land development business, he’d been working with his father Oscar, originally a surveyor, who’d become a successful developer. And he was Paul’s chief mentor and financier. However, in a family of high flyers, Paul was considered the plodder. In fact, that’s exactly what his sister Anne called him – the plodder. He was academically mediocre and socially awkward, with a reticent nature that bordered on shy. Nevertheless, he was keen to break out and try his hand at the business.

He was no sooner the owner of Warrina than his plans began to unravel for, though he’d bought the house cheaply, he couldn’t go ahead with his original plan to pull it down and build a block of flats. The council refused to approve his development application and, what was worse, things were not going well with his other developments, most of which he couldn’t sell. A severe credit squeeze meant that suburban developments were proving extremely challenging. It was a double whammy. Not only was Paul lumbered with an asset which he wasn’t too sure he really wanted, he also faced the humiliating prospect of having to admit his failure in a business in which his family had excelled. His father was not impressed. “You have got yourself into a bit of a hole, haven’t you?” Oscar remarked, drily. Paul was desperate. Land development required cash.

Faced with the prospect of going broke, still living at home, and with few other assets, he met with his accountant, hoping to find a way out of this financial hole. “What is making money these days?” he asked. The accountant’s answer was to the point: “Hospitals,” he said, “Convalescent hospitals.” Well Paul didn’t have a clue about that. However, unlike most people, and Paul was definitely not like most people, he was curious. And once his curiosity had been peaked, he persisted.

Paul was intuitive. The main thing about him is that Paul was nothing like any other businessman. This is the reason this biography is a bit different, perhaps, from other biographies of businessmen. He was not a person who had great plans, he didn’t go by the account books. He was intuitive. Every single thing he did in his life came from that intuition. And all the people around him who helped him do that, were carried along. A lot of them became frustrated. Quite often they thought he’d made some terrible blues, but he came out on top. He lost almost as much money as he made. But in the end he left that $3.5 billion and he left it for people who needed it in the Ramsay Foundation and to the Centre for Western Civilisation, which is probably, hopefully, going to be one of the best things he ever did.

FOLLOWING TONY ABBOTT’S LAUNCH OF PAUL RAMSAY – A MAN FOR OTHERS AND ANGELA SHANAHAN’S RESPONSE, ON WEDNESDAY 7 OCTOBER 2020, A DISCUSSION WITH GERARD HENDERSON FOLLOWED.

Gerard Henderson: So many thanks to Angela Shanahan for talking about her book Paul Ramsay: A Man for Others.  So now we come to questions and discussion. Thanks Tony and thanks Angela. Angela, what does a “man for others” mean? And Tony, how was he a man for others?

Angela Shanahan: Well, it’s a motto. It’s a Jesuit motto that they are now using at the Jesuits school Riverview. That wasn’t the motto when he was there, but it is their motto now. It struck me as being very apt, not just because of the hospital business. He was always very interested in what anyone was doing and if he could help them a bit. Sometimes he would forget. I was told a story about a waiter Paul kept meeting at various functions who had bad teeth – Dracula-like teeth. Every time he met him, Paul would say, “I’m going to get your teeth fixed, I’m going to get your teeth fixed.. That’s the sort of thing he did, quite spontaneously.

Gerard Henderson: But did he get his teeth fixed?

Angela Shanahan: I don’t think the waiter every got his teeth fixed, because that’s the sort of person Paul was. But there were other things that he would do that were quite big. He would spontaneously give money to a big cause, for example. What struck me also was the sort of people he befriended and how he managed to get them into the business and how he used that for his business. He understood instinctively that business is really about people. It’s not just about the numbers on the sheet. It’s really about the people involved.

One interesting relationship was with Marjorie Brisley, a lady who had come to work for the Ramsay Company as a bookkeeper. She wasn’t any great brainbox – as Michael Siddle was at great pains to point out to me – and she was a bit older than Paul. Her husband died and she was a widow. As an accountant/bookkeeper, Paul befriended her because he felt sorry for her, particularly after her husband’s death. She would give him bits of advice on what to do in the hospitals and she became his HR-type person. He used to take her on trips with him, and to the hospitals.

In America she was invaluable when they decided to buy the HMO – that’s a health management company. She went into the clinic, walked around and talked to all the people. She talked to the doctors, nurses, patients. She figured out who should run the HMO, particularly in Miami. After Paul took over the company, he and Marjorie noticed Louis Lamella, a pharmacist working at the clinic and who had been demoted but knew all about the running of the HMO. The clinic had become a drop-in centre for old Cubans and Louis was able to keep the Cubans around. Marjorie and Paul had figured this out. That’s how Ramsay was a man for others. He understood human psychology almost instinctively. And of course, he did the Carnegie thing.

Gerard Henderson: So Tony, a man for others. What’s your understanding of that and how do you think Paul Ramsay was a man for others?

Tony Abbott: Well, Angela’s right. It’s a Jesuit motto which was certainly bandied around a lot when I was at St Ignatius College back in the early 1970s. It means what it says. You are supposed to focus not on yourself. You are supposed to be about helping others rather than helping yourself. Paul very much lived up to that. If I can tell a little story – the first Pollie Pedal back in 1998 was to raise money for a western Sydney charity called Youth Insearch. There was a youngster who participated on that ride who was the star pupil of Youth Insearch. He’d grown up in Lithgow in very, very difficult circumstances. I got to know him quite well on that ride and I said to him, what do you want to do? And he said well, I’d love to be a psychiatrist. It turned out he didn’t know much about psychiatry. I said “Well, you know, to be a psychiatrist, you’ve got to be a doctor first, have you thought of that?” And he said, “Well, no, I haven’t.” I asked him if he knew what it would take to get into medical school and he said no. I suspect there would have been very few of his teachers in those days at Lithgow High that would have had any real sense of what it took.

I mentioned this to Paul. Within a couple of months, the boy had been signed up to Riverview for his final year of school. And while he didn’t actually end up doing medicine, he did go to university. He did study IT. I caught up with him about a decade later. By that stage, he was running a successful small business in IT in my former electorate. Most recently, he was a senior executive with quite a large business. This was a guy who Paul helped. He didn’t have to, but he did because of the alchemy of Paul’s life. And while things didn’t work out exactly as Paul planned, they worked out well. That was part of the charm and the greatness of this man.

Gerard Henderson: Before we move on, can we go back and take up your point Angela that you didn’t know about Paul Ramsay before you were commissioned to write the book. So very briefly, he’s born, what, 1939? He dies 2014. Now, his education, he starts off young but when does he go to St Ignatius College, Riverview, the Jesuit College in Sydney.

Tony Abbott: In the early 1950s.

Gerard Henderson: Early 50s. How long was he there for? And what happened after that? He entered the Law school at Sydney, but not for long. What’s the story there?

Tony Abbott: Well, as Angela recounts in the book, there were various business ventures which petered out. There was a bit of roaming around in Europe, which again, didn’t take him very far. But the story is the one Angela begins the book with, the purchase of a rundown guesthouse in Mosman that ultimately became the first hospital in the Ramsay empire, ultimately a psychiatric hospital. This was the beginning. As Angela has recounted earlier, Paul was going nowhere. Then came that question, what is making money? Which was very shrewdly answered by his then accountant.

Angela Shanahan: His family were very puzzled by him. He was the only one who didn’t really shine at anything. His older brother, John, became a Jesuit. And then there was Peter who was was the gentleman of the family; Peter was the brains and Paul was just the plodder, or so I was told. In a sense, he wasn’t expected to do a great deal. But he expected a lot of himself because he came from a very distinguished family. His grandfather had chosen the site for Canberra.

Gerard Henderson: His grandfather was?

Angela Shanahan: His grandfather was Sir Austin Chapman, the first postmaster general and a member of the very first Australian parliament. The family looked up to him. He was the great ancestor. So Paul Ramsay expected a lot of himself. When you say man for others, he actually did expect a lot of himself. Civic virtue was something that was very much part of their family.

Gerard Henderson: Okay. So in those days, as I understand it, the Law school was not on the campus of Sydney. It was in Phillip Street. How long did he last at the law? He must have had school results good enough to get into law. So how long did he last?

Angela Shanahan: He actually was at the bottom of his class.

Tony Abbott: And Gerard, as you might remember in those days, it was pre-Whitlam. You had to pay fees. And if you could pay the fees, you could do the course.

Gerard Henderson: Well you had to pay fees if you didn’t win a scholarship.

Angela Shanahan: That’s right.

Gerard Henderson: And he didn’t win a scholarship, but he could pay the fees. Well, that would explain it. The rest of us had to win scholarships.

Angela Shanahan: There were some great stars in his class. John Cowell was in his class. Also John Dunford.

Gerard Henderson: But did he get beyond first year or did he drop out in first year?

Angela Shanahan: He dropped out in first year.

Gerard Henderson: The reason I ask that is I just wondered how well Ramsay understood universities because today’s universities are not the kind of concept that John Henry Newman wrote about. They are no longer this great centre of wisdom and knowledge, as I understood them in the 1960s. I think Ramsay would have understood them if he’d gone to one, but he never really did. Today, giving a lot of money to a university will usually end up, as happened with the United States Studies Centre, being taken over by the left. So, however good your intentions are, they’ll probably be counterproductive. Do you think he understood universities when he gave you this money to set up courses in universities?

Tony Abbott: Well, Gerard, my experience at university was somewhat different to that which you’re driving at. There was certainly a lot of conflict on campus, ideological conflict, intellectual dissension on campus in my time in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But the spirit and the temper of the place was still profoundly conservative in the best sense. Yes, we had the political economy dispute at Sydney University, the general philosophy dispute at Sydney University. But those involved were a breakaway group of Gramsci radicals and a very staunch group of intellectual conservatives who respected the body of knowledge that had been passed on to them and they wanted to build on it. That is my idea of a university. That I think was Paul’s idea of a university.

One of the things that slightly surprised and disappointed me was the way universities, which had been so initially enthusiastic about the Ramsay centres coming there, went to water the instant the academic left acted up. I’m pleased, obviously, that we’ve got three universities, Queensland, Wollongong and the ACU, which are happy and proud to host these centres, which are not about brainwashing in any way, shape or form, but which are about inculcating in the students, not an uncritical acceptance, but a decent appreciation of that which has shaped us. How can we understand who we are if we don’t know where we’ve come from and what are the ideas and the thoughts, what are the great books, the great thinkers that have made us.

Gerard Henderson: You are probably lucky in a way, because if you’d been taken up by the ANU, Melbourne University and Sydney University, which was the original intention, there are not many conservatives as academics in social sciences in those universities.

Tony Abbott: Well, the interesting thing is that the Ramsay Centre had a selection process, which would be a partnership with the university. The idea was not just that the existing academic staff would teach the relevant courses, but there would be a body of staff who would go through a selection process that would teach the course. One of the emphases of the Ramsay Centre is on teaching. We want and we expect these courses to be well taught by people who love teaching, not by academics who say teaching as an unnecessary distraction from their research and their publication. Teaching should be at the heart of these courses and that’s my understanding as to how they’re developing.

Gerard Henderson: So tell us about his will, if it was a will, or the way Paul Ramsay left his money. The overwhelming bulk of the money goes to the Ramsay Foundation, which is giving money out to charities. Then a small part of it goes to the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation. So how do the two relate together?

Angela Shanahan: The Centre for Civilisation will be over 20 per cent of the foundation’s budget. Paul didn’t actually leave in his will any mandate for the foundation. He set up a foundation because he thought that a rich guy should have a foundation. A few people had said to him, what are you going to do, have you got any ideas? So he set it up with $5 million, which to him was really nothing. Just so that he could set it up. It wasn’t until later that the Western civilisation idea came to fruition. He decided the money could come from the foundation. Unfortunately, in his will, he didn’t leave any specific mandate for the foundation. So, the foundation had to figure out what they were going to do with all this money and how they were going to spend it. They knew about the Centre for Western Civilisation and were keen on that. But then they had to search overseas for a model. They looked at quite a few. They looked at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as well as a whole lot of others. I deal with this in the book. The foundation is to give money in three different areas – education, health and, for want of a better word, disadvantage. In Western Australia, there’s a longitudinal study they’ve funded. There is research for a Coronavirus vaccine at Queensland University. The Centre for Western Civilisation is separate. But the money comes from the foundation.

Gerard Henderson: It was guaranteed.

Angela Shanahan: Well, this is the problem. It’s guaranteed for the next four years. But whether or not it will continue after that is not decided. I did write a piece in The Australian about this, in that I had heard that they hadn’t had an absolute guarantee that it would be funded after this current four years. I don’t know if anything has happened since then.

Tony Abbott: Look, I have no reason to think that the foundation won’t continue to fund the Centre, particularly now that the Centre is successfully up and running. I think that the controversy, which dogged the Centre early on, has been magnificently overcome, thanks in part to Simon Haines and in part to John Howard. The staff of the Centre are so professional and have been completely open with the universities they’re dealing with. I’m confident the foundation will be sufficiently proud of the work that the Centre is doing to be continuing funders of it. And certainly, I’m very confident the Paul would be extremely proud of the work that the Centre is doing.

Angela Shanahan: Well one would hope so. But I’m a bit suspicious that it’s not going to continue beyond the agreed time.

Gerard Henderson: Which was?

Angela Shanahan: Until 2024, isn’t it?

Gerard Henderson: Ten years after its …

Tony Abbott: It was essentially an eight-year funding commitment.

Angela Shanahan: So it’s 2026. After that it depends. I’m not the only person who’s written about this. The left wing press has been onto it, oddly, quite fairly in lots of ways.

Gerard Henderson: So, tell me about Paul. Was he the only person who read Carnegie’s “How to Make Friends and Influence People” and it worked?

Angela Shanahan: I don’t know. When I found out about it, I was a bit shocked. I didn’t think anyone took it so seriously. But, he did take it seriously. And he made all the employees do it, along with all his partners and the Siddle family. They took it very seriously.

Gerard Henderson: Well, he certainly influenced people, and he made friends. Perhaps I should buy a copy.

Tony Abbott: I thoroughly recommend it. I read How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Gerard Henderson: Do you reckon it worked for you?

Tony Abbott: I’m not sure how much I’ve influenced people but I’ve certainly made some friends over many years. As a practical manual and as a kind of a guide to common sense behavior, it’s very accessible. I would certainly have no hesitation in recommending it.

Angela Shanahan: It suits a certain personality, that’s the thing. Paul had that. Paul had that desire to make people like him. He really wanted people to like him.

Tony Abbott: And that’s not a bad thing.

Angela Shanahan: No.

Tony Abbott: We shouldn’t go through life encouraging people to dislike us. Even though some of us have succeeded better than others at it.

Angela Shanahan: I think we three people who would not fit that.

Gerard Henderson: Well I’ve never sought to have people like me.

Angela Shanahan: You know it’s changed as it goes on through the generations because it was actually written in 1930. It was written in the Depression. And it was written in order to help people try and get a job, basically. But it’s changed over time and it’s become more sophisticated. And there are seminars and they do all sorts of things with it.

Gerard Henderson: I must enrol. Now tell us about Paul Ramsay. The phrase “a man for others” is attributed, maybe falsely, to St Ignatius of Loyola, who went into battle for the Catholic Church after the Protestant Reformation and during the Counter Reformation. But tell us about Paul Ramsay’s religious attitudes. He went to a Catholic school but did he remain a believer? Was he a regular church attendee? What was he like?

Angela Shanahan: He tried to go to Mass whenever he could, I was told. He had a very eclectic lifestyle. He travelled continuously. He virtually never spent the same two nights in a row in the same place. Wherever he was, particularly in London, he liked going to a Jesuit Church. Chris Gunn, who was his Man Friday told me that Paul knelt down every night before he went to bed and said his prayers.

Gerard Henderson: But he didn’t leave any money to the church.

Tony Abbott: Over the years Paul had given an enormous amount of support to places like Riverview. There’s the Ramsay Hall at Riverview which was a multi-million dollar investment. So, there was a lot of a lot of generosity over the years to various church agencies. Paul and I once had a discussion. I said, of course, you can give your money to the Jesuits. But the Jesuits are set in their path and they will just keep doing whatever it is they’re doing. Or you can put it into something which is new, which is separate, which is yours, and which is going to make a difference. And that’s why I think he was particularly attracted to the idea of the Centre for Western Civilisation.

Angela Shanahan: He actually supported a school in Timor too, a Jesuit school was set up.

Gerard Henderson: Was he a reader? Did he know much about Western civilisation? Or did he just like what he thought it was?

Angela Shanahan: He liked biographies of great men. He was always carrying around biographies of great men. One of his friends told me that after he went to Russia, he got the biography of Peter the Great but the friend said he didn’t think Paul ever got past the first three pages. That’s the sort of person he was. At his home, there’s a biography of Winston Churchill and this and that. He read an enormous amount of papers and periodicals. He always had newspapers. People would say to me that he was a great reader. In fact, one of his friends, Semen Savchenko, who shared his life almost to the end, told me he never really finished a whole book. But he would read the paper from beginning to end every morning and that was part of his method, his working method.

Gerard Henderson: Well he would learn a lot reading newspapers.

Angela Shanahan: Well he would find out what was going on and he would ring people up each day and would take notes, sometimes word for word, about what they said. Somebody told me that he actually tended to parrot back to people everything he learnt from somebody else. The funniest thing was when he actually parroted something back that you’d told him.

Tony Abbott: It’s very flattering.

Gerard Henderson: But why his restlessness? He’s a man of great wealth and he can go where he wants to go. But it is odd that he never spent more than a very brief time at any one place. He always has to be moving. Why is that?

Angela Shanahan: I don’t know really.

Gerard Henderson: Was he escaping from something?

Tony Abbott: He had business interests that eventually spanned the globe. He had hospitals in France. He had hospitals in the United States. He had hospitals in Britain. He had hospitals in Indonesia and elsewhere.

Angela Shanahan: He owned the biggest hospital company in France. And he would go every year to Europe. He had two boats and he was actually building another one when he died, in Europe. And he spent a lot of time just moseying around while everyone else did the hard yakka.

Tony Abbott: But he had friends in all these places that he liked to visit.

Angela Shanahan: Exactly.

Gerard Henderson: But was he escaping something because he’s always moving?

Angela Shanahan: Was he escaping? I think he was lonely in lots of ways. I don’t think he fitted into any milieu; the old school milieu he enjoyed up to a point, but then he would push off. A lot of his friends said to me, you know, Paul, you invite him for something and you’d think he would come and he just didn’t show up. And he would often do that. Maybe escaping something…

Gerard Henderson: Or is that just rudeness?

Angela Shanahan: Rudeness?

Gerard Henderson: Well it’s pretty rude not to show up.

Angela Shanahan: Well it was a bit. One poor woman he rang up one night when he was in Hong Kong. He was expected at her dinner and she had everything prepared, you know. He said, sorry I’m not going.

Tony Abbott: He may have honestly forgot.

Angela Shanahan: But they all laughed about it. This is the thing.

Gerard Henderson: He probably had a lot of money. That’s why they laughed about it. If you’d done it, they wouldn’t have laughed about it.

Angela Shanahan: I know. That’s probably true.

Gerard Henderson: Or you.

Angela Shanahan: On the other hand, he used to take whole families with him on his trips. For instance, there was a family called Shipways. They often used to go off on the boat and he’d take them to the Olympic Games. He went to every single Olympic Games except for two in his lifetime.

Tony Abbott: The interesting thing about Paul is that if you just look at the at the bare bones, you can say he was an unusual person and you can speculate on what may or may not have been his inner demons. But everyone who knew Paul found a person who might occasionally be vague but who was genuinely interested in them and went out of his way, sometimes to an almost superhuman extent, to be helpful. And this is why I think Angela gets to the heart of it when she says that he was, in a remarkable sense, a man for others. He seemed to be almost uniquely engaged with others, a very wide range of people.

Angela Shanahan: The biggest sorrow of his life was not having children of his own. He actually told somebody that right at the end of his life. And they said, well, why didn’t you? He said well – pretty obvious – I didn’t get married. It wasn’t as obvious to the young person who asked him. We’re living in different times. But he was completely unique in his family. He wasn’t like the others. He didn’t get on very well with his brother for a very long time.

Gerard Henderson: Which brother was this?

Angela Shanahan: The middle one.

Gerard Henderson: The Jesuit was the elder one?

Angela Shanahan: The elder one he absolutely idolised. He and Paul even looked alike. Peter, the mathematician, was the middle one and running the business. When the parents died, he and Paul had a big bust up because Peter wanted to continue to run the business. But Paul needed his share of the money and their sister sided with Paul.

Gerard Henderson: So if you invite him to dinner and he rings you from Hong Kong and says he’s not coming, or if he has a row with his brother over the family leftovers, is he a man for others or a man for himself?

Angela Shanahan: No, that was a very different situation that will thing. No, he was right with that and the sister backed him up. Because they wanted the business sold and the house sold and for the proceeds to be divided. But the middle brother wanted to continue to run the business. I mean, he had run the business with his father, but, you know, they needed the money and she needed the money, too. So, I think, no, I think he did the right thing there. I do think that he was a bit lackadaisical about this sort of thing, you know, about not always showing up.

 Tony Abbott: He could be a bit vague. No doubt about that.

Angela Shanahan: He was a bit vague. James Packer thought he was just wonderful and one day asked Paul Keating when out on the boat, “How did such a nice guy become so rich and successful?” He’d never met anyone quite like that.

Gerard Henderson: But if he ends up with $3 billion change when he dies, he can’t have been nice to everyone. It’s a pretty tough world out there, you know.

Angela Shanahan: He never sacked anyone.

Gerard Henderson: Sounds like the public service.

Angela Shanahan: How to win friends and influence people. He got everyone else to do that stuff. He ran the company very much at arm’s length.

Tony Abbott: But he did treat his staff almost like family.

Angela Shanahan: They all came on the boat.

Tony Abbott: I introduced Paul to different people who invariably he tried to help. Once he had tried to help them, it wasn’t like they were customers, or they were business partners. It was like they were part of the family. It’s interesting that a number of people with whom Paul had made investments, in his will, he basically gifted those investments to those individuals which, again, is very rare and remarkable.

Angela Shanahan: It is. Warwick Smith, who described himself as a “hard-headed banker”, said people would just walk on water for Paul. And he said we realised he was a good risk.

Tony Abbott: There was nothing mercenary about him.

Angela Shanahan: He was a terrible borrower. He borrowed to the hilt, all the time. He was fearless, a fearless borrower. Warwick Smith said to me that, most people would go under if they took too many risks. But, somehow or other, the banks always trusted Paul. They trusted him to do well. Also, the hospital business is a good business at core. The other thing about Paul is he always bought hospitals with good real estate because he knew deep down that your wealth in land is more important than anything.

Gerard Henderson: Okay, a final question. He dies, you’re at his send off. What happened?

Tony Abbott: Well, he died too soon. He had a magnificent send off. There was a glittering array of people who turned up at Bowral Catholic church to farewell him. A current Prime Minister, a former Prime Minister, a Who’s Who of business.

Angela Shanahan: People in tears, like James Packer.

Tony Abbott: It was an extraordinary send off because, again, this unusual and in some ways eccentric person managed to touch people in a way that very few others do. And he was the absolute anthesis of your driven, domineering, demanding, grasping tycoon. He was the anthesis of it.

Gerard Henderson: That’s a great moment on which to end. All the best Angela for success of Paul Ramsay: A Man for Others. I think we made him interesting today.