“Can Do” – The Campbell Newman Story

The Hon Campbell Newman is the former premier of Queensland and former Lord Mayor of Brisbane. In 2012, Newman led the newly formed Liberal National Party to a landslide victory in the Queensland state elections. As the very popular former Mayor of Brisbane, Newman took office after winning the swinging seat of Ashgrove. His government proved unpopular, however, as it made tough economic reforms and went on to lose narrowly at the following state elections in 2015. Campbell Newman joined his biographer Gavin King to address The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 27 October 2015.

CAN DO – THE CAMPBELL NEWMAN STORY

CAMPBELL NEWMAN

Can I start by thanking Gerard and Anne and The Sydney Institute, and all of you for your interest in coming along this evening. I also thank the staff and management of the Gallipoli Club for facilitating this get together. And I thank my author, my former colleague and my friend Gavin King. He’s done me a great service, and also my wife and my family and, indeed, my mother and my father by telling our story. This evening I want to cover a few things. I want to talk about the book, but also about some of those matters of reform that Gavin has alluded to.

In terms of the book, I particularly wanted to tell a story. As Gavin said, I didn’t recognise the person that had been written about and spoken about in the media, particularly over the last three years. I wanted to tell my story. I wanted to set the record straight. In particular, I wanted to let people know who I was, what I tried to do, and why I stood for politics in the first place. The book does not especially detail what was achieved but there is an appendix where you can see what I believe were my achievements both in the Lord Mayoralty and with my time in George Street at the State government. I wanted to tell that particular tale.

The book is a story about a family, how they came to be in Australia, and about my mother and father’s time in politics. Gerard himself was there for a period. Then there was my time in Brisbane’s City Hall and as Premier of Queensland. And, of course, a reflection on the whole issue of reform.

Just to whet your appetite, a few things that we’ve dug up on the way, in no particular order – a few are rather quirky and may be of interest. For example, my great, great grandfather came to Sydney in 1854. Herman Newman, German cook on a Dutch ship and arrived not very far from here. Shortly thereafter he married a young Irish girl who was on the same ship. She was an orphan from the potato famine and from Dublin. They settled in St Peters, not far from Sydney Airport. So the Newman’s were from Sydney for about 100 years. And you’ll see the photo in the book of their very modest beginnings.

Mum’s family, on the other hand, came from Melbourne. We found a story of a Captain James Mullet who sailed the Pacific in the 1880s and 1890s. He could catch sea lions which he took to the west coast of the US. He sold them to zoos and circuses. We found a reference to him in the New York Times in the 1880s saying that Captain Mullet had arrived with another consignment of sea lions. Sadly, he seemed to have abandoned both his wife and his family.

Interestingly, we found that Mullet’s grandson, or my grandfather, had an early bent for politics. He was a solicitor in the city of Melbourne and stood as a candidate in 1952 at the Victorian elections. Interestingly, he found a loophole in the law. He stood for two seats, simultaneously, in the same election. We have a copy of the photo of the how-to-vote card, as Lyn Mullet stood for those two seats.

There’s no doubt that Gough Whitlam was a great man in many ways, but he was also a deeply flawed man. And the history of his times is being written, particularly by the left, seeking to airbrush some of the problems out. What we reveal in this book is something that nobody has ever known and, thankfully, my mother Jocelyn is not around to refute it. At the 1972 election, my father – who was the commanding officer of the Fifth Battalion Royal Australian Regiment – invited the local federal member, at Holsworthy in Sydney, to speak about the Labor Party’s defence policy. The local member was Gough Whitlam, then Opposition leader. We found a letter, a hand written note, from Gough dated October 1972 thanking Dad for having him and reflecting on some of the things they had talked about. A few weeks later, Dad went into the polling booth and voted for Whitlam. And I’m pretty certain that Mum did too.

The point I’m making here is that within two years Whitlam and the Labor Party had lost my parents. They joined the Liberal Party and Dad stood as the Liberal candidate in the Bass by-election in 1975. And, as many of you know, he won that election by a landslide and later that year Fraser had the confidence to pull on what became known as the Dismissal.

I make that point, an important one, in this book, because the history is airbrushed today. The Whitlam government caused great problems for this nation and many, many people voted in large numbers to throw them out of office. That needs to be remembered.

In terms of my own political career, why did I stand? I stood, as Gavin said, to get things done. Particularly, I put my hand up to deliver infrastructure for the city of Brisbane – roads, bridges, new buses and so on. We delivered those things. I’m also very proud that we made the decision to restore the elegant and beautiful City Hall at a cost of $215 million, although many people had said to knock it down. We planted two million trees. We moved to only buy renewable energy for the needs of the Brisbane City Council which involves some 4-5000 kilometres of roads with street lights. That was a very big commitment in a practical way to renewable energy.

Along the way, I was always planning ahead. I had been very concerned, even though we were in drought and we had a water supply crisis, about flooding. As a civil engineer, I knew that Brisbane could flood and would flood again one day. In late 2010, it was very clear -looking at the figures from the Bureau of Meteorology BOM and other developments, that we would see significant rain. When I spoke of it, I was ridiculed. I was called Chicken Little. The then premier, Anna Bligh, herself had a go at me. They wheeled out public servants to say, “What nonsense, Brisbane couldn’t flood again.” I had a particularly bad relationship with the Bligh Government compared to a very productive one with the Beattie Government.

The bottom line was, Brisbane did flood. As Gavin has written, I already had been very popular. But at that point I reached the peak of my popularity. Interestingly, the then premier, Anna Bligh, also got a big bounce in the polls. In late January 2011, it was very clear to me that Bligh would go to an early election, probably by June that year. There was no doubt in my mind.

I’d been approached in many occasions to stand for state politics. I’d always said no. Contrary to the nonsense today about me today that I was drafted, I drafted myself. Gavin writes about how that happened. I said I would have a go because I couldn’t bear to see a bad Labor government re-elected – a bad government that had failed to plan for water supply in the same way that they failed to plan for flooding. A government that had blown the state’s finances apart.

I must dispel your thoughts that the LNP somehow did the wrong thing by me in giving me a swinging seat. That was the seat I put my hand up for because it was my community. Lisa and I had met at the Enoggera army barracks, which is in the electorate. We were married there, our first born was christened there, we lived in Ashgrove for ten years. We still bank at Westpac Ashgrove 4060. We live about two kilometres from the border of the seat. I knew it was a difficult seat. I went there to do what was right, not to be after a secure or safe seat. I wanted to lead the team and show what needed to be done. And that’s what we did.

I put my hand up. And we created political history by doing this, by doing the impossible and from out of government. I make the point that the strong reflection I have on that time, and subsequently, is always that the media felt somehow this was a non-legitimate way to go. There was always a sort of resentment or undercurrent that this wasn’t right, that this shouldn’t be happening. This was transmitted by the Labor Party.

As Gavin said, in 2011 we had the dirtiest campaign ever. We’ve told that story frankly and truthfully. We’ve been quite open; indeed, my wife and I have bared our souls. It’s clear that it affected her, but it also affected me. It affected my persona and the way that I dealt with things in my time as premier. I make that confession this evening, as I do in the book.

In terms of what we particularly wanted to say, in this book we have reflected on issues that are pretty sad and worrying about Australia today. There was no focus in the media, during my time as premier, on what we were trying to do. There was no real belief in the Queensland community that Queensland is, in fact, in the worst financial position of any Australian state. Queenslander simply do not accept this. I have to take some responsibility for that, but I can assure you we did try. And, because of that terrible financial situation, and because of the economic malaise that Queensland was in at the time, we had to make some very important, and very difficult, decisions.

But we did not prevail in the 2015 state election. And while I can say that coal seam gas was not our problem in the electorate, Sydney radio broadcaster Alan Jones was a factor in how the election played out against us. He made a lot of noise in the election campaign. He certainly prevented us from getting our message out, night after night, on the TV news because he would have said something outrageous that I always had to answer. It didn’t matter to the media that I was announcing some positive initiative on the back of the great reforms, for example in our hospitals. Alan jones was a distraction.

He did campaign against coal seam gas. But in the areas where coal seam gas and coal mining is occurring in Queensland he did not influence the vote. Let me just rattle off the seats that were affected. Toowoomba North, Toowoomba South, Condamine, Warrego, Gregory, Nanango and Southern Downs. We won every single one of those seats. In fact, we won back Condamine from the Katter party. So I say to Alan Jones, I hope you’re watching, because coal seam gas is not an issue in Queensland. And people get the benefits. My government reconciled the conflict between farmers and the coal seam gas miners. It’s going to be a great growth industry for Queensland. Unfortunately, Alan Jones has created a mood in NSW, and NSW will soon have very expensive gas.

I would often say to the media, “Do you think we’d make this announcement, do you think we’d put this on the table, if it wasn’t the right thing to do? We’re not silly, we know it’s not popular, but it has to happen. Sadly, and I’ll reflect in a moment on why, these sorts of messages don’t get transmitted. And that’s an important part of what we have to say in this book. We had hoped that the media, in Queensland particularly, would take this on board and faithfully engage in a debate on this. Sadly, they have proven everything that Gavin has said about the role of the media today by failing to deal with this issue.

And if they’re watching this broadcast, I say to them don’t just believe me; look at what Paul Kelly said about four weeks ago in The Australian. In fact, he has said it a few times in recent times. Kelly is saying there is something wrong with political debate and government in Australia today. We have had five prime ministers in five years. The shelf life of governments and political leaders is rapidly reducing. Whether you agree or disagree with them all, I don’t think the five prime ministers were duds. Yet some people today are trying to suggest that. Measured against benchmarks of 50 or 60 years ago, those leaders were as good or bad as any. But something has changed. I will now go through what I think has changed.

There are three issues that I’ll put on the table as a way of explanation about some of what we’re seeing. Firstly, in terms of the media, there has been huge fragmentation. People are not reading newspapers, they’re not tuning in necessarily to the TV news, there’s a whole variety of entertainment and social media that people engage with. There are Netflix, Fox TV, Quickflix. People don’t have to watch the TV news at all. The scene is incredibly competitive. It’s therefore hard to attract an audience and hang on to it.

Then, of course, there is the huge pile of advertising dollars in play. So we see two phenomena that I’ll quickly run through. The first one is click baiting. You may have heard of it. Click baiting is simply the term used to describe the need for people in the media to try and get the community, the viewer if you like, to click on a link to a story on their website. Promoters need those clicks because that’s how performance is measured. Advertising dollars relate to the clicks that a product gains. And what does that drive? It drives sensationalism. It drives the need to be in people’s faces to get those clicks. Because of this competition, and reduced time in stories, there is an intense race to get stuff up. Stories that once – in a reputable publication – wouldn’t have got up, today are getting up on news websites far more readily.

With my Health Minister Lawrence Springborg, one day late in 2014, I announced that some 12,000 people who were waiting to get their cataracts and glaucoma consults would be seen and operated on within months. I would have thought that announcement was fairly newsworthy given that we cut hospital waiting lists and improvement emergency room waiting times. But, what got on the news that night? That was the day Clive Palmer asserted that I has a mental health problem and wasn’t taking medication. And that led the news. Forty years ago, if Clive Palmer or some such person had ranted such nonsense, decent journos would have ignored it. But today it’s entertainment, and they will run it.

One more matter to raise this evening is what I call the Big Brother phenomenon. In my opinion, we’re getting to the point that there’s only one TV show on Australian commercial TV. What’s that show? It’s the reality TV show. I don’t how many people here today watch the commercial stations. Frankly, I’m switching off. Because the same show is on, the same genre is on, all the time. There’s the cooking show, a competition; there’s the renovation rescue show, there’s the weight loss show, there’s the dance competition and the singing competition. It’s all the same thing. There’s the good guys and the bad guys, the good girls and the bad girls. You’re told to really dislike or even hate the bad people, and you vote them off the show.

So we turn to the TV news in that precious period of time where people who’ve got the use of our electromagnetic spectrum, a licence from the community, and what have they done to debate in this country? Well, they’ve treated it the same way as the TV shows. I’ve been told by a number of senior people in the TV media who say to me, “What are you on about Campbell? It’s just entertainment.” It is not good enough. We need a conversation and a debate.

Before I move off the issue of the media I’ll say this, and this may surprise people, because normally conservative politicians belt the ABC. I have particular views on the ABC’s political bent, but I will say this. It’s only on the ABC, and Sky News, that there is a forum for conversation and debate. The mistake some conservatives have made is not to engage. We need to engage. On 7:30 , on Lateline, even Q &A, on the radio shows, we’ve got to get in there and step up to the plate and be part of that conversation. If I go to Seven, Nine and Ten, there’s precious little debate, there’s precious little conversation. It’s a complex, challenging world with huge issues that we face as a community. Yet, they’ve dumbed down the news and are trying to express things in black and white terms, in 10 and 15 second grabs. I’m afraid that isn’t doing us any good.

Two other matters I’ll quickly touch on are social media and the community itself. There’s no doubt that smart phones and tablets have changed things to a huge degree. I’ve often said to Jeff Kennett that it would be very difficult today, in this environment, for him to win a second term. I admired what his government did. But the use of social media devices, the speed at which innuendo, rumour, downright lies and fabrication can travel, the echo chamber effect, compound the difficulties in dealing with misinformation.

There’s a saying that a lie can go half way round the world while the truth is only getting its boots on. It’s even truer today. New technology is an area we don’t know quite how to deal with.

My final point is the community. After 20 years of good times and 20 years of unparalleled growth, the community perhaps thinks that politics isn’t important, that things will continue to travel the way they always have. Most are benefitting from the difficult and challenging reforms of 30 years ago and don’t realise that those times are probably starting to end. We do have some very big challenges that we face right now. Politics is more important than ever. We’re not seeing the reform of our generation. We’re not seeing answers to an aging population. Fewer people are in the workforce. We have a wave of disruptive technologies – internet technology, nanotechnology, 3D printing and now robotics which will transform the workplace – that we need to gear up for.

The biggest challenge is unsustainable government spending – in health, in welfare and to a large extent in education. I say today, quite proudly and unequivocally, more money is not the answer. It’s never been the answer. We need better management, we need efficiency, we need to deal with waste and the problems of overlap and duplication between the federal and state governments. We need to deal with bloated and inefficient and non-responsive government. These are things that I do not see people dealing and they must be dealt with.

My final point is rather pointed. I’m very disappointed, indeed dismayed, when I hear the debate these days among leaders saying we need to increase the GST. We need to broaden the tax base. We need to fiddle with superannuation, yet again. I thought conservatives were for smaller, more efficient government and not for more taxes dressed up as reforms. I repudiate that as I always did. I’m on the record, as premier, as rejecting an increase to the GST. Instead, I wish administrators – state and federal – would start to work harder on policies to save money rather than asking citizens to put their hands in their pockets once more.

It has been fantastic to be able to tell our story, to be able to describe what your motivations were all about, to put on record amusing family anecdotes, but particularly to leave something behind so that people will know, particularly my own family, what it was all about. This has been a great privilege. I will be forever indebted to Gavin King for being my biographer.

One last point – maybe the most important. My time as premier very much about getting things done. And the skills that I learnt as Mayor of Brisbane about getting things done and getting things organised were all very helpful. But it was also a liability. In the Bundaberg floods, for example, I walked up to a couple who had lost everything and I was trying to comfort them by telling them what we would do to clean up their neighbourhood, fix up the street and help them with their house. I was going through a shopping list of things, and one of my ministers was watching on TV and saying, “Just give them a hug Campbell!” But I didn’t. I wasn’t into hugging strangers. Maybe if I’d hugged more strangers I’d still be the Premier of Queensland today!