My Misguided Youth: With Tony Abbott, Bob Carr And Many More

Australian columnist and commentator Greg Sheridan’s early life saw him become intimate friends and colleagues with a fascinating list of people who went on to be part of Australia’s political leadership. Sheridan’s 2015 memoir, When We Were Young and Foolish, traces Sheridan’s determined and passionate journey from an underprivileged but emotionally rich childhood in Sydney’s inner west, to a world of clashing political fronts. To reflect on some of his book and life story, Greg Sheridan addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 25 August 2015. The paper which follows is an edited transcript of Greg Sheridan’s address.

MY MISGUIDED YOUTH: WITH TONY ABBOTT, BOB CARR AND MANY MORE

GREG SHERIDAN

I would particularly like to thank Gerard and Anne for putting this function on and for all the work they do in The Sydney Institute. You won’t believe it looking at Gerard’s youthful mien, but Gerard is actually a little older than I am. And, as a young fellow, Gerard was one of the people I looked up to and admired and to some extent wanted to emulate. You have to admire, if nothing else, my rank, courage or foolishness.

Imagine giving a talk which is going to be, in large measure, about B A Santamaria and the National Civic Council to an audience which includes Gerard Henderson. This is just ridiculous. Journalists like to give broad brush impressionistic dispositions to audiences with no knowledge of detail and well-prepared only by popular prejudice. Which we like to encourage and reinforce. The idea of someone who is really a scholar in the field that you’re talking about is frightful. However, there I go, into the dens of lions.

I recall a comment which Adlai Stevenson made in a very similar situation to this. He said words to the effect that for the next 25 minutes or so, it would be his job to talk, and the audience’s job to listen and if those in the audience happened to finish their job before he finished his, he had no hard feelings whatsoever. Obviously, I want to talk about my book, When We Were Young and Foolish – about why I wrote it and a bit about what it contains.

Writing a memoir is, of course, a very self-indulgent thing to do and I hasten to suggest that my life in public affairs is not worthy, in itself, of a memoir. I’m not a prime minister, I’m not a foreign minister, I’m not a movie star or the sort of person about whom people are interested. But I do believe that there is a value in trying to capture a certain time and place in Sydney and Australia in our recent past and in our political past. I believe this had not been done justice in much literature. Partly because of the way the National Civic Council has substantially disappeared from our history. I’ll come to that a bit more later.

I did also want to explain the world view that I’ve developed over these nearly 60 years that I’ve been on the earth. It’s perhaps a minority world view so I wanted to explain how I came to that world view and then offer a defence of it. Part of that world view includes a view about religion.

I’m just old enough to have been schooled in journalism in the period when there was a strong tradition of Australian secularism. This didn’t mean religion was banished all together from public life, but it did mean that we Catholics and our Protestant friends would agree not to fight with each other all the time so that life would be manageable for us and the Protestants and for everybody else. For a long time I respected that and therefore never wrote about any issue touching on religious belief or practice.

However, the culture became so militantly secular and so anti-religious and so hostile to any religious view of human nature, or human life or human purpose, that in time I came to the view that if you have a religious perspective and you don’t talk about it, while you talk about everything else, it’s cowardice. People who have a religious view of life ought to at least be able to claim minority rights. Perhaps the anti-discrimination legislation could be amended to include us, so that while you can lampoon and mock us, and so forth, at least we have to get our one or two per cent of air-time or something like that.

In any event, part of my book does explain what I believe religiously. Also, for a person of my generation, religious belief and political belief are often intertwined. They certainly were in my case. The final ambition of the book was to try to tell a few jokes and give people a smile. I identify very closely with Malcolm Muggeridge’s adaptation of Keats’ “tread softly for you tread on my jokes” and I hope the book has a degree of good humour in it.

The synopsis of the story, for what it’s worth, is that I grew up in inner western Sydney in a normal working class family; my father was a clerk and my mother didn’t work outside the home. There were four kids, and we had a little sister who died as well. So there were five overall but four for most of my childhood. The first political event I recall was the assassination of John F Kennedy, which meant a great deal to us as inner Sydney Catholics, in 1963. It happened on the same date as my seventh birthday. Because of time differences it didn’t happen while I was having my birthday party but it was a very big event for us, at least in my little Catholic area in inner western Sydney.

We lived in Lewisham and it was a bit of a Catholic ghetto. There were two Christian Brothers schools, a school run by nuns and a very big parish church that included a monsignor and three curates, as well as a Catholic hospital. When I was a little kid I looked at all these big institutions and I thought the church was the great world. We didn’t have a TV or a car when I was young, we walked everywhere and a lot of our life centred on the church. When the President was assassinated, we felt to some extent that it was our president and we felt very proud of John F Kennedy. We felt about him the way Africans felt about Barack Obama. He had demonstrated that one of our people could be the best person in the world and there was no one you could admire more than the President Kennedy. In that same year, I also began listening to the weekly broadcasts of B A Santamaria on Point of View.

My father had been active in B A Santamaria’s movement in Sydney, and he’d been active in his trade union for the industrial groups trying to break communist control. After he died, I discovered a lot of union tickets for unions in trades that he had never ever worked in. In fact, he used to go along to these union meetings and also to some sectarian Protestant meetings to try to get them to change tack. He would be thrown out because he could never shut up and the instruction was to be quiet and vote the right way. He never got to stay until the vote.

My Dad belonged to the painters and decorators union. I have his painters and decorators union card, although in fact he was a clerk. Once he was heckling a left wing union official who was speaking and a fellow turned around and asked him to show his hands saying he had never been a painter in his life. Three burly blokes threw him out. I had a lot to live up to with Dad’s legacy, but we felt that the Church was being persecuted by the communists in the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe and China. It wasn’t a strictly sectarian concern, but we felt that a great chunk of humanity was being persecuted by communists and it was our job to fight against communists and reduce their influence.

Another motive for writing the book is my feeling that Australians have forgotten about the Cold War. There’s no accountability for the Cold War. All the people in Australia who supported the communists are still lorded and celebrated as great heroes, as though they were fighting for equal rights for women cleaners in hospitals or some such. In fact, they were supporting, often very actively, the despotism of Stalin and Mao and later Pol Pot in Cambodia.

Our Sunday mornings were a wonderful ritual for me. We’d go to 10:00 am Mass at St Thomas’ Church in Lewisham. We’d come home and watch the World of Sport which was all about Rugby League with Ron Casey. Then I’d watch Vincent Cervantes Nature’s Walkabout, so much so that I had a pretty defective imagination as a kid thinking all history and nature occurred in black and white as all Aussie TVs were at the time. Then we’d watch World Championship Wrestling with Amrio Marlano and Kela Kaworski and the hopeless Larry O‘David, the poor dopey Australian who always got beaten. After all that, the highlight of our Sundays was watching B A Santamaria’s Point of View. This does weigh on your psyche over time. Santamaria was a great man and he was right about the big issue of his time, which was communism. But he certainly didn’t underestimate dangers. He was never guilty of gross understatement.

Listening to Santa, week after week, it was always one minute to midnight and the enemy was always at our second last line of defences. Mind you, a lot of the things Santa said at the time bear an uncanny cadence today, or have a certain rhyme today. One of his great lines about the right wing of the ALP was that you can have the policies so long as we have the jobs and it seems that’s coming back a bit.

In any event, in the last couple of years of high school I got very active in Santamaria’s organisation. I then had a year in a Catholic seminary training to be a Redemptorist priest. They were great fellows. And I didn’t leave thinking that they hadn’t recognised my genius and that I was too good for them or they weren’t good enough for me. I left feeling how on earth did they put up with me for a whole year? I also had a certain feeling of gratitude for having had a year with such brilliant men, many of whom had Roman doctorates.

When I came back to Sydney as a teenager, my father had qualified as an accountant and we’d moved from working class Lewisham to the very middle class Forestville. Certainly it was a move up the social scale a few runs. There, I joined the Liberal Party to help William McMahon fight Gough Whitlam because I thought Whitlam was favouring the communists in Vietnam and there was altogether too much communist influence in the Labor Party. This was the first sign of my deep eccentricity.

Joining the Liberal Party in order to support William McMahon prefigured my friendship with Tony Abbott. The only time Abbott ever voted Labor in his life was voting for Barry Unsworth. He nearly joined the Labor Party to support Barry Unsworth. Now a lot of people joined the Labor Party because of Gough Whitlam, a lot of people because of Bob Hawke, but not many because of Barry Unsworth. I also had a high opinion of Barry Unsworth. His ultimate defeat was the defeat of an ideal for me – that a socially conservative Catholic could lead the Labor Party to electoral success.

I got involved with the Liberal Party to oppose Gough Whitlam, handed out how-to-vote cards for Billy McMahon. He went down in a screaming defeat in late 1972. Then, in 1973 and 1974, I became very active in the National Civic Council. In 1974, I went to work for them full time for a few months. In the election of 1974, I handed out how-to-vote cards for Jack Kane and the Democratic Labor Party. Jack Kane was a great guy. And, as I reveal in my book, Tony Abbott more or less ghost wrote Jack’s memoirs. From this, I went to Sydney University where I met Tony Abbott who became my best friend. He had more friends than I did, but he was certainly my best friend. I met him in the most auspicious of circumstances when we both ran for class representative of Economics 1, Sydney University.

Sydney University had two strands of economics, Marxist and mathematics. If you didn’t interpret the world either through Mathematical symbols or Marxist symbols there was nowhere else for you. In terms of style, I was a natural in the Marxist stream. I was a literacy focused, bearded, long haired, neurotic geek who never saw reason to go to bed at night, never saw a reason to get up in the morning and spent all my time reading books. But I couldn’t abide Marxist politics. In the mathematics class there were clever people doing integral calculus and so forth, and describing reality almost as inaccurately as the Marxists were, thinking that you could reduce society to a series of mathematical equations.

In the first week of quantitative economics, the lecturer announced that there would be an election for the class representative. Tony and I both nominated for no reason other than youthful high spirits. Neither of us had a program, or any idea what the staff/student committee was going to do. We both made a speech the following week against each either. We hadn’t met – Tony gave a very witty, funny, clever speech, parodied the style of the lecturer and wrote hieroglyphics on his overhead projector just as the lecturer did. I gave a very dull, earnest, plodding speech.

Modesty forbids me from telling you who won that election. Then we met that afternoon, Tony and me, at the first meeting of the Sydney University Democratic Club. This was B A Santamaria’s aligned group. I thought Tony was a surfer type, sandy hair and so fit. I thought he was an empty headed surfer. He thought I was a leftie. But we found that we had quite a bit in common after all, even though he couldn’t have been less like me in the sense that he was a super self-confident alpha male, friendly and already playing top grade Rugby Union and a great sportsman and so forth. We became great friends and we spent the next couple of years battling the extreme left in student politics.

This was a great education. I had the great privilege of becoming friends with a lot of people from all the mainstream parts of Australian politics. The far left controlled student politics and an amalgam of independent leftists, communists, Maoists, pro- Soviet communist and Trotskyists controlled the Australian Union of Students. They had very weird policies. At one stage, they sent compulsorily collected money to the Vietcong. At another stage, they sent it to the PLO. And, at one stage, they had a policy that all men were complicit in the crime of rape; they defined a man as being a male over the age of seven. So at seven you’re an innocent little boy, at eight you’re a rapist. Bad luck fella.

We were outraged. The great Yugoslav philosopher Mila Vanjila says the beginning of everything is moral outrage. Well, Tony and I and others were outraged that this mob of extremists was taking our money and using our names and so on. So Tony and I became very active in student politics and we formed an alliance with all the mainstream groups – Labor Party people, Liberals, Jewish student groups, evangelical student groups, the NCC groups and a lot of independent students who just didn’t like extremists.

Most students, quite sensibly, had no interest in student politics. The left created a sub culture that was so violent and unpleasant that most students kept well away from it which is how the left liked it. They just wanted the students’ money. We eventually determined to try to get campuses to break away from AUS to disaffiliate and deny them money. Tony was successful in his second attempt and was elected president of the Student Representative Council in the biggest vote in the history of the university till then. That was remarkable for a guy who had Tony’s political views which were conservative by student standards.

At one point, Tony Abbott had a strategy that we should take over the Sydney University Liberal Club. We were the Sydney University Democratic Club and Tony and I wrote all the leaflets the club put out in 1977. They were generally under a joint by-line. I don’t know how we managed that without coming to blows because we each had the Irish disease to an advanced degree. We agreed on 99 per cent of everything and fought furiously about the one per cent that we disagreed on. But we took over the Liberal Club, which we thought of as a bunch of social types who only engaged in wine and cheese nights. And for a minute, I became the senior vice president of the Sydney University Liberal Club. I immediately wrote to the then PM, Malcolm Fraser, saying I wanted to meet him to change the law so that student union money was used for the Australian Union of Students. We needed to have voluntary membership of the AUS. I lectured the PM with all the vim and vigour of a 21-year old man full of certitude.

The PM wrote back and agreed, asking me to meet him the following week in Canberra. But right at that moment one of the unions very much influenced by the National Civic Council was having a big internal brawl in NSW. Its officials had led all the union members away from the federal union to amalgamate with the building workers industrial union, which was led by the pro-Soviet Pat Clancy. That union needed a team of industrial organisers and staff to run their campaign to bring back the 40,000 NSW shop assistants. They offered me a job as an industrial organiser. And who’s going to say no to that. What fun.

So I joined the shop assistants union as an industrial organiser, and replied to Malcolm Fraser that I would no longer be able to meet him because I was otherwise engaged that week. Like a lot of Sydney families, my father had a cousin and a brother whom we called uncles. One uncle was a minor office bearer in the Liberal Party, the other ran the Labor machine on the central coast. My father was a very active DLP supporter, yet between the three of them there was not a cigarette paper’s difference in their political philosophy. They just happened to be in three different political parties.

Tony Abbott and I drove to the Central Coast, and I joined my uncle’s branch. He was very happy to have me because he was under siege from the left wing steering committee. At the first branch meeting I attended, the steering committee had the numbers but my uncle wasn’t going to let that interfere and declared the meeting over. They tried to storm the stage, but among my uncle’s supporters was a family of circus wrestlers. So we repelled the invasion of the steering committee – on that night, Rome triumphed over Moscow.

Joining the Labor Party was slightly complicated for me – given that I had been a member of the Young Liberals and senior vice president of the Sydney University Liberal Club and in the Democratic Club at Macquarie University and Sydney University. My membership was reviewed by no less a figure than John Ducker, who was then the head of the Labour Council, and Michael Easson. They surveyed my record of relentless anti-communist activism and concluded that this was just what was needed in the Labor Party. They welcomed me in.

I remained a member while I was a Shop Assistants Union official for 18 months or so. We had great brawls with the Building Workers Industrial Union and we pulled back the members. It was tremendous fun. I loved working with Shop Assistants who were conservative and very sensible. I tried to lead one strike, but management collapsed before we went out. It was over the very vexed issue of making my members wear pricing guns on their hips. I was willing to bring the retail industry to its knees over this issue.

While I was a union official, I was freelancing for the Bulletin under the pen name of Lance Millard and for the Australian under the pen name of Paul Mann. It got confusing but I kept track and kept approaching Trevor Kennedy for a job. Finally he relented and hired me. Years later, I asked him why he did it. He replied that he could see I had that unpleasant, difficult, quarrelsome personality which is so essential for success in journalism. And I loved him when he said that. I told him that nobody had ever said kinder words to me.

Kennedy produced a remarkable Bulletin because he had a philosophy of hiring people who did not have conventional journalistic backgrounds but they were people he thought had something to say. He hired Malcolm Turnbull and Bob Carr and, after I left, I recommended that Tony Abbott go and work there. Trevor hired Tony Abbott too. He hired John Edwards, who went on to the Reserve Bank board, he hired Gary Sturgess who became chief of the Cabinet Office in the Greiner Government. It was a remarkable news room.

At the Bulletin, I became very good friends with Bob Carr and we have remained friends ever since. Although I disagree with his current position on the Middle East, he was enormously witty and he used to tease me for being a Santamaria supporter. Of course, he had all the dirt files on me from Labor Party headquarters. Santamaria once wrote a column saying Europe hadn’t been the same since the fall of the Hapsburg Empire. I walked into the office that morning and Bob Carr greeted me with, “Ah, here’s Sheridan; he wants to bring back the Hapsburgs. Let’s hear it for the Hapsburgs.” He leapt on a desk proclaiming that all over Europe people were saying being back the Hapsburgs. It was all great fun. We did actually get paid for this.

I have ended my book at the time I joined The Australian in 1984, under the editorship of Les Hollings and John Wheeldon. Wheeldon was another great bloke. Like Jack Kane, he was an outstanding Australian of his generation. As I end the book, I am setting off to be the Beijing correspondent for The Australian. I would become the first journalist ever to be briefed by Kevin Rudd, who was a junior diplomat at the time. Clearly, I made this experience so pleasant for Kevin that he never stopped doing it. Thereafter, he spent the rest of his life briefing journalists. I often wonder if I had been mean to him, the world might have been a different place.

Now, a few substantive points to conclude. When the NCC unions went back into the Labor Party, they did so under Bob Hawke’s guidance in a very deliberate strategy by Bob Hawke to change the nature of the Labor Party. This happened in the early 1980s and it had an odd consequence. It was in their interest, and the interest of their sponsors in the Labor Party, not to talk much about their NCC background. The NCC also had an internal split, with the union arm distancing itself from Santamaria. To Santamaria’s credit, he never leaked material to discredit those unions after they had returned to the Labor Party. However, it led to the NCC being whited out of much Australian history. For example, a well known NCC union official – Mike O’Sullivan – used to write industrial relations reports for the Bulletin under the name of Joe Manton. These were brilliant pieces, so brilliant that in the official histories of those years in the early 1970s, Joe Manton was often quoted. But nobody ever revealed who Joe Manton was. And Mike, when he became a respectable figure in mainstream Labor, never talked about his past. When Jim Maher, the national leader of the Shop Assistants Union, died there were obituaries of him in the mainstream press. They didn’t mention his NCC affiliations. Thus, the significant roles that Santamaria people played in history was wiped out.

The other point I make is that although Santamaria was an equivocal figure in some respects, and he had many flaws and I totally disagree with his economics in the last period of his life, he was very kind to me and a very big influence on me intellectually. He was a good example because he never took a backwards step. He was a very important influence on Tony Abbott as well.

The NCC had enormous institutional consequences in Australian life. A large number of big trade unions were seriously anti-communist because of the NCC. It played a very big role in Laurie Short’s triumph in the Iron Workers Union and in a lot of other unions. It also kept the communists under pressure, and under challenge, in the unions that they did control.

For a time, the DLP had five senators and, regularly, got 10 per cent of the national vote in the Senate. Santamaria also had important institutional and personal connections in South East Asia. Some tens of thousands of people passed through the NCC over time. The great weakness of Santamaria was that he didn’t allow alternative leaders to emerge within the NCC. Many of the good people who passed through it went on to be very significant in Australian life, starting with the PM. There are a lot of people now in the Labor Party and the Liberal Party who are NCC alumni. There’s a very distinguished institution, The Sydney Institute, which is headed by a NCC alumnist, and a foreign editor of a national newspaper who is an NCC alumni.

When you judge this organisation, which is virtually unheard of in Australian discourse today, you have to look at those broad institutional consequences and the DLP. The NCC-DLP group was certainly important in the State Aid debate and the Defence debate and it kept Labor out of office for a very long time.