Category: Politics

State Funeral for John Kerin, Friday 14 April 2023.

John Kerin’s contribution to the success of the Hawke-Keating government has been grievously understated and uncelebrated.

Given the economic, environmental, managerial and social change it successfully engineered, having someone who could neutralise the farm lobby was a boon to the ALP’s parliamentary machine. It contributed significantly to the material reforms of the Hawke/Keating era.

As Shadow Minister for Primary Industry from 1980 Kerin, like colleagues in a similar situation, had worked hard with a small number of advisers to devise and consult on a detailed plan for primary industry – against the chance that a Labor government should be elected.

Bob Hawke’s accession to the position of Prime Minister has been very well documented – although history is still to hear the view of the Drover’s Dog itself.

The need for a reformist Labor government to neutralise conservative rural forces was made more urgent and difficult by the fact that those right-leaning interests, after years of ineffective fumbling by the National Party, had been blessed with a competent and ambitious leadership group. It was the National Farmers Federation (NFF).

The NFF was formed in 1979 as a single national voice for Australian farmers. By 1983 the NFF was demonstrating its intention and capacity to be a strong conservative political force – at least in relation to larger scale producers and more significant agricultural industries, and at least in relation to farm policy narrowly defined.

John Kerin was appointed by Hawke as his Minister for Primary Industry. He was placed front and centre in the sometimes theatrical struggle between a lively and refurbished agricultural interest group and the ambitions of a newly-formed social democratic national administration.

In 1983 some of the natural support for ‘a fair go for farmers’ occasioned by widespread drought was waning. The dry which had affected much of Eastern Australia was weakening its grip. But there were still rude clubs available with which a rural interest group might bludgeon an incoming Labor government. For one thing interest rates were ‘complainably high’ – mostly above 10% until 1995. For another there were industrial relations.

For the NFF the field of industrial relations was an obvious setting for efforts to diminish the power and place of unions. Farm leaders had already been heavily involved in the live sheep export dispute in 1978 and the NFF announced itself unsheepishly through its battle with the Australian Workers Union over the use of a wide comb (1982-83).

It was therefore no surprise when the NFF committed to a dispute involving the Australian Meat Industry Employees Union (AMIEU) at the Mudginberri abattoir in the Northern Territory. The dispute ground on from 1983 to 1986 and only ended after picket lines, 27 court cases and two years of litigation before the Arbitration Commission.

The union was fined and eventually lost face. Mudginberri was seen by the New Right as a win in the campaign to break the power of the unions and introduce contract employment. The NFF is on the public record as claiming that “the win over the Labor Government and over the unions in a bitter IR dispute just months before, galvanised the impact the bush could have when it stood united in demand of a fair go”. It seemed to be bracing itself for the role of standard bearer for those interests wanting to break the power of unions.

This could have become the main agenda in agriculture under a new Labor Government: testy battles between farmers (as employers and business managers) and unions which were of significance in the sector. The unions might have been given support for naive ideological reasons by a new Labor Minister for Agriculture.

But part of the magic of John Kerin – now sadly passed from view – was that he was not an ideologue and he was not naïve.

Kerin was trained as an economist but was by nature a scientist. He sought evidence of what was true and without that, doubted everything. Sadly he sometimes doubted himself.

He had an insatiable appetite for facts at all levels, from the cellular to the philosophical. He read widely. He was driven by what he saw as the opportunity for a Labor Government to make Australia a more modern, productive and fairer contributor to a peaceful world. (He had lofty ambitions.)

The political situation Kerin faced was one in which:

” Labor for the most part had no profile and no following in the bush. We were up against a profound agricultural fundamentalism, constrained by a federal structure which allowed the parties to play off one set of interests against another – and there was indifference at best to this set of issues in the Labor Party itself .”

At the beginning of Kerin’s long term as Minister the NFF continued to circle, armed with higher expectations from its more militaristic members and growing confidence in its own power. It set about fomenting the 1980s version of ‘A Rural Crisis’.

On 1 July 1985 an estimated 40,000- 45,000 farmers and their friends rallied at Parliament House “to protest about the effect of taxes and charges on the farming community and lack of government concern about their welfare”. In December of the same year 25 tonnes of Frank Daniel’s wheat was dumped at the door of Parliament House.

But Kerin was not for turning. Given his natural instincts, his fascination with the industries in his protection, and a real belief in the rectitude of the task given him, Kerin was building bridges, not moats. He opened the path between agricultural people (not just their leaders) and the evil of ‘Canberra’.

From the beginning Kerin demonstrated a technical understanding of agriculture and other resource industries but he always wanted to know more. He was consistent and approachable. And it was difficult not to like him, despite his jokes. He had what he called “a tough farming background” so his empathy with farmers and their families was deeply rooted.

As Minister he developed a vast network of contacts. He built an encyclopaedic knowledge of individuals in agriculture, fisheries and forestry and their resource, processing and financial off-shoots.

A meeting with Minister Kerin, home or away, could be charming, memorable and touching, even if one wanted to complain about reduced fishing quotas or the price of superphosphate. It certainly would never be a meeting characterised by arrogance, disinterest or interpersonal rudeness on the Minister’s part. He wanted to learn, so he listened.

The farming public, as well as agricultural scientists, researchers and public servants, grew quickly to trust Kerin and soon thereafter to like working with him. More rabid right wing commentators could agree that he was a good man in the wrong political party.

Meanwhile, over at the NFF, Ian McLachlan was playing a straight bat as President (1984-1988) as a warm-up to becoming Minister for Defence in a Howard Ministry (1996). He was followed in the Chair by John Allwright (1988-1991) and Graham Blight (1991-1994). The relationship between Presidents and Minister were cordial, respectful and businesslike.

For political effectiveness the NFF looked to the drive and leadership of Executive Directors, Andrew Robb (1985-1988) and the tragically parted Rick Farley (1988-1995). The organisation was well cashed-up for action: farmers had contributed millions of dollars to establish the Australian Farmers Fighting Fund.

Even with these assets at their disposal, nothing could prevent the NFF from respecting the Minister.

There was to be no refusing Kerin’s personality and working style. In his own policy memoir (of 720 pages) he listed the reform issues he took on:

“- they were about structural adjustment; gaining commodity production efficiencies; productivity increases; gaining some stability in essential research funding; establishing more relevant infrastructure and institutions; ensuring essential awareness of environmental issues; the elimination of self-defeating subsidies and protection; defining and implementing rural policies, not just agricultural; and about the government’s work to achieve international agricultural trade reforms.”

In July 1987 Kerin was appointed Minister for Primary Industries and Energy. This covered agriculture, fisheries, forests, and minerals. It was an enormous load of subject matter, much of it extremely complex and requiring detailed consideration. The industries in this mega-department earned about 60 per cent of Australia’s total export income.

Kerin’s success was not due just to his personality. He worked extremely hard. He often started shortly after 5.00am and worked until midnight. And most Monday evenings would see him travelling to ALP Branch meetings in his electorate in South-West Sydney.

He had the active support of the Prime Minister on many matters. The Prime Minister’s considerations were guided by the economic importance of primary industries and energy, and by the fact that he and his Minister both had the perspective of rural, regional and remote areas as home to many families and commercial activities apart from agriculture.

John Kerin’s professional journey took him from what he was delighted to describe as ‘Chook Farmer to Treasurer’. On the way he passed through philosophy and economics degrees at the University of New England and the ANU, and through the Bureau of Agricultural Economics (BAE). En route he made lifelong friendships with other economists of weight and significance, including Bob Whan, Stuart Harris and Geoff Miller. He had the constant support of his partner, June.

John Kerin’s track record in policy relating to primary industries and resource management has not been matched by any other Minister – and may never be.

His professional style, hard work and personal decency resulted, without doubt, in a positive ‘gross operating surplus’ for agriculture and other resource-based industries.

For more on this topic, see:

The way I saw it; the way it was; the making of national agricultural and natural resource management policy, John C Kerin, published by the Analysis and Policy Observatory, 2017.

[Re-published 7 November after glitch on 6th.]

The transition from Boris Johnson to Liz Truss took two months. From Hawke to Keating took exactly 45 minutes. Here’s a reminder.

Minutes of special meeting of the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party held Thursday, December 19, 1991

The meeting opened at 6:36 pm with CAROLYN JAKOBSEN in the chair, who specified the meeting was being held under Rule 12(a).

The LEADER announced his resignation. He said he believed that the 1993 election would be a most important one and his leadership gave the best chance for a Labor victory. He wanted to put behind the Party the trauma of the period of the challenge.

He said there were two indisputable facts:

The Australian media wanted  Paul Keating for Prime Minister and the ALP wanted Bob Hawke. He hoped the will of the ALP would prevail. He tendered his resignation and nominated for the position of LEADER.

The RETURNING OFFICER took over the meeting. He called for further nominations.

PAUL KEATING then nominated himself.

The meeting was adjourned to allow preparation of ballot papers.

At 6:50 pm the ballot papers were made available and voting commenced.

At 7.06 pm the returning officer declared he had received 107 ballot papers and the result was:

KEATING 56

HAWKE   51

PAUL KEATING addressed the meeting. He paid tribute to Bob Hawke’s leadership over a decade. It was an electoral record unequalled and we all owed him an enormous debt.

There was a standing acclamation for BOB HAWKE.

[Paul Keating then spoke of Bob Hawke’s achievements.]

BOB HAWKE then addressed the caucus. He congratulated PAUL KEATING and thanked the 51 who had voted for him in the ballot. He pledged complete support to the party and the Government. He would not utter one word to harm Paul or his Government. It had been a privilege to lead the Party for nine years and his reward was to be able to leave Australia a better place.

The meeting closed at 7:21 pm.”

There had been wrangling and heartache for many months. But the final resolution was swift.

Croakey provided extensive coverage of the 2022 election campaign (www.croakey.org/category/elections-and-budgets/). But because they were simply not available, it included very few projections of the result.

Despite this, polling was (as usual) a prominent source of news and discussion generated during the campaign.

The apparent reluctance of  the pundits and pollsters to go public with predictions was presumably the result of their multiple failures in the lead-up to the 2019 election.

It was perhaps due to the absence of precise projections from the ‘professional’ psephologists that  Croakey’s Editor-in-Chief, Melissa Sweet, approached some casual observers of federal politics about their expectations of the results. On Sunday 15 May, one week before the election, I emailed my thoughts.

The net bottom-line of my predictions was that the election would result in a House of Representatives comprising 78 from the ALP, 65 from the Coalition and 8 independents including the six already on the cross-benches.

With the results declared we know that the House of Representatives will now comprise 77 from the ALP, 58 from the Coalition and 16 independents.

Although the  net prediction ended up being close to perfect, it was made up of a number of erroneous predictions which in effect cancelled each other out.

In the lead-up to 21 May my overall summary – given to people who sought one – was that the ALP had not done badly enough in the campaign to offset two strong forces: dislike of  Scott Morrison and his ways; and the general feeling that it was time for someone else to have a go after nine years of the Coalition.

In my view what happened in the campaign was virtually irrelevant to the election result. What did matter were three things which were fixed or determined by the time the election was called:

1. an aggregated and generalised view across the voting population of the current government, this view built up over three years and shaped by the media;
2. personal voters’ perceptions of the leaders of the major political groupings – their likeability, the way they present on television, and what one has heard about them in the media and in the pub;
3. local, electorate-by-electorate issues, including changes in local candidates (eg the retirement of a popular member) and any cut-through of particular local issues (such as aircraft noise in Brisbane).

The hardest of these three to allow for is the third. Keen observation can give one a pretty accurate assessment of the public’s view of the government and of the perception of party leaders. On the other hand, accurate predictions of the impact of local issues requires intelligence from 151 different locations.

Like everyone else, I failed to pick the strength of the greening of metropolitan seats and of the rejection of the Liberal Party in Western Australia.

I considered electorates which everyone knew would determine the result. I picked eight of the 12 electorates that shifted from the Coalition to Labor: Bennelong, Boothby, Chisholm, Higgins,  Pearce, Reid, Robertson and Swan. But in this category I missed Hasluck and Tangney, and was wrong on Braddon, Lindsay, Longman and Nicholls, all of which were retained by the Coalition.

My prognostications were based partly on the false premise that most of the seats that changed hands would do so between the two major party groups. On the back of my envelope, as well as being wrong on those four that were in the event retained by the Coalition, I also thought that three seats would go the other way – from the ALP to the Coalition: Corangamite, Dobell and Gilmore. It might also be that I underestimated a gender phenomenon because all three of them were retained for the ALP by women (Libby Coker, Emma McBride and Fiona Phillips).

In terms of the numbers, my greatest failure was in relation to the community independents. Whereas I thought the number on the cross-benches would increase from 6 to 8, as we now know it is increasing from 6 to 16.

No one could have picked the fact that three seats in Brisbane would go to the Greens. In relation to high-profile seats, I thought that both Bridget Archer and Trent Zimmerman (North Sydney) would hold on due to the profile and credibility associated with their crossing the floor on the religious discrimination Bill. Bridget Archer did, Trent Zimmerman did not. Also I picked Josh Freudenberg to retain his seat, on the basis of how he presents and communicates and a view about his capability and leadership prospects.

I was correct about a number of seats which it was thought might change hands but which did not. These included Bass, Dunkley, Flynn, Hunter, Parramatta and Warringah (this last already being held by an Independent). One of the interesting matters for the future is how easy it will be for strong independent candidates to build a wall or moat around their incumbency.

In such an exercise there are always outliers that it is impossible to predict. This time they included Fowler (where the result was determined before the election by an administrative order), Tangney, Griffith, Ryan and Brisbane. In Tangney Special Minister of State Ben Morton was beaten by Sam Lim with a swing of 11.44% to the ALP.

This exercise in election-watching should remind us that it is not the number of seats that change hands that is important but the balance – the net balance – between flows in two main directions. An election in which three seats change hands can have the same aggregate result as one in which 33 seats change hands, if the 33 are distributed 15 one way and 18 the other.

On the matter of the extent to which an election campaign influences the result, there is much more to be said.

In this year’s federal election campaign there has been justified criticism of journalists’ fondness for gotcha questions. But there is a  broader and more costly crisis in the way that election campaigns are structured and covered by media.

For very good reason there has been much said recently about the role of the media in the election campaign. Special criticism has been directed at the propensity of too many journalists to ask so-called ‘gotcha’ questions. This trivialises discussion of the stance of the parties on policy issues.

However, there is another approach to media coverage of the election campaign that is equally facile and useless, albeit less toxic. This is the construction, through interviews with selected members of the public, of what is believed to be a policy agenda against which the political parties can be judged.

This process is premised on erroneous beliefs about how and when individual voters make decisions about who they will vote for. It provides much of the basis for a mistaken belief that promises made during the campaign play a major role in determining the election result.

Among other things, this process provides a rationale for the supposed existence of a cohort of swinging voters large enough to determine the result, and who will decide in the last days of the campaign who they will support.

The true situation is that the result of the election is determined by the cumulative perception of the majority of voters of events over three years. For the vast bulk of electors this perception is fixed before the circus of the campaign begins and intersects with their normal voting behaviour. In just a small proportion of cases the intersection of habitual voting practice and perception of a party’s performance over three years leads to a change in voting

behaviour. The net result of these changes in two directions – to and from the major parties – determines the outcome.

The stupidity of this system of election coverage and the beliefs that underpin it is illustrated by the ubiquitous use of ‘vox pops’ from ‘interesting electorates’. The commonest question posed in such high street encounters is along the lines of “What do you think are the important issues for voters in this electorate?” In effect this is asking a random individual voter to summarise the policy landscape as if they will cast their vote on the basis of a Party’s performance on each of its elements. Policy issues selected will be based on what has happened over the previous three years, shaped largely by the media into an agenda that is characterised by almost universal agreement on what is on it, even though the position of individual media entities on each element may be different.

Thus it is that the currently accepted policy agenda comprises the cost of living (for which a proxy is the cost of energy in the home), the relationship with China, trust in government processes (and how they might be improved), climate change, job availability and the security of work, the establishment’s treatment of women, and the ongoing impact of Covid 19. Also on the list are issues that no reasonable person, when stopped in the street by a reporter with a microphone, would deny: health, education, the cost of childcare and the war in Europe.

 We are expected to believe that the Coalition’s and the ALP’s position on these “current priorities” will soon determine the vote of the person being interviewed on the street and that they are representative of voters in this key (marginal) electorate. The trouble is that they and everyone else has only one  vote, and in most cases it is rusted on to one of the major political groupings: Liberal, Labor, Green or National.

If the interviewee is an unemployed homeowner or tenant, electricity prices will be important. But so might be management of climate change, continuity of government, the Ukraine, secure borders and the pay of aged care workers. Which to choose as the determinant of their vote?

If the vox pop is for television, the producer of the segment will select for broadcast according to the value of the talent (an interesting face; a bizarre response) and with an eye to political balance for the piece, the program and the media entity.

Not part of the currently accepted policy agenda are reform of the taxation system, improving productivity, social and economic inequality, the Uluru statement, reform of aged care, funding of the NDIS, the concentration of media ownership, the more esoteric matters relating to faith, culture and gender, and ‘national security’.

Just about the only useful question to be put to someone in the street is: “Do you intend to change your vote from the last time?”

If the answer is yes, the reasons are worth identifying. It is probably caused by accumulated feelings of frustration and alienation with their usual preference, a view of the party leaders, or by a change in the personalities in the local contest. It is almost certainly not due to one party’s decision on one of the so-called key issues.

Given these views about the use and purpose of much of the way an election campaign is covered by the media, one obvious conclusion is that it is a poor use of scarce parliamentary resources. It is useful every three years to raise the profile of safe, democratic political processes. But too much of the content of election campaigns is meaningless and too much of the apparent excitement is bogus.