Button review

Testosterone in Spring Street

John Button

Paul Strangio and Brian Costar (eds)
The Victorian Premiers 1856-2006
Federation Press, $59.95 hb, 431 pp, 1862876010

Gough Whitlam was sometimes naughty. Descending in a crowded lift from a conference attended by a number of state parliamentary delegates, he looked down on his fellow passengers and growled ‘pissant state politicians’. It was the sort of remark he liked to get off his chest. In a more deliberative mood, Whitlam, in his 1957 Chifley Memorial Lecture, wrote of state parliamentarians in the following terms: ‘Much can be achieved by Labor members of the state parliaments in effectuating Labor’s aims of more effective powers for the national parliament and for local government. Their role is to bring about their own dissolution.’ These remarks reflect a widespread dissatisfaction with Australia’s ‘colonial’ constitution and with the division of powers between the three tiers of government. The Whitlam government favoured increased powers and responsibilities for both Canberra and local government.
The Victorian Premiers 1856–2006 is a salutary reminder that the Constitution was drawn up by colonial politicians, and that they and their successors in state parliaments seem to be here to stay, as an evolving part of our political history. Time will tell how things will develop in the future, following the recent High Court decision, which increased the powers of the Commonwealth at the expense of the states.
This book is a collection of essays by seventeen contributors, edited by two lively and perceptive Melbourne academics, Paul Strangio and Brian Costar. It suffers from the problem of most contributed books, due to differences of style and emphasis. Most of the premiers already have biographies in the Australian Dictionary of Biography. If you want premiers en masse this is it, but it should be seen as a convenient reference book rather than as a ‘compelling journey’, as described in the publisher’s press release.

Politicians are, of course, creatures of their times. The early premiers were dominated by the issues of the day, of which gold discovery and its consequences were the most pressing. The latter included a big population influx and the vexed questions associated with land distribution and tenure. As Geoffrey Serle put it in The Golden Age (1963): ‘Gold enabled Higginbotham, Berry, Syme and Duffy to take their place in Australian history.’ Similarly, the 1890s Depression and the influence of the Age proprietor David Syme enabled three short-term premiers – James Munro, William Shiels and J.B. Patterson – to take their place in history as bumbling incompetents.

There were also the perennial issues of voting qualifications, land tenure, the country versus the city, free trade versus protection, and occasional corruption, which kept cropping up to plague successive premiers. Their task was almost invariably compounded by the Legislative Council (Upper House), constitutionally established in the 1850s with the power to block legislation and to ‘protect the interests of the wealthy and conservative long into the future’. These undemocratic shackles were only finally broken when the government of John Cain Jr reformed the election laws; the Bracks government put the final touches on democratic reform of the Legislative Council. In the meantime, many premiers were forced into dubious, short-lived political alliances, a number of them becoming consummate wheeler-dealers in the process.

Forty-four premiers in one hundred and fifty years seems a lot. Eleven of them had terms of less than one year. Only four – Albert Dunstan, Henry Bolte, Rupert Hamer and John Cain Jr – held office for more than 3000 days (an arbitrary period determined by Jeff Kennett); each of them has been rewarded with a statue in Treasury Place. With reasonable good fortune, Steve Bracks will soon join this bronzed élite. Longevity in office is often seen as the greatest political virtue; being a ‘survivor’ is regarded as a sign of cleverness. But good luck is often a powerful contributing factor to political longevity. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Albert Dunstan held office for ten years and did very little. According to Brian Costar, author of the Dunstan chapter, ‘he survived because of the unreformed electoral system and the weakness of the other political parties – notably the ALP, which took nearly a decade and a half to recover from the Depression election disaster of 1932’. Bolte and Hamer enjoyed good economic times (as has Bracks), and had it easy because of the incompetence and disarray of the ALP. Cain Jr was less fortunate, with a federal ALP government less than sympathetic to his government’s Keynesian approach to economic management, the onset of recession at the end of his term, and factional brawling within the ALP. Longevity in politics is important, but not everything. William Irvine (1902–04), for example, premier for only eighteen months, certainly made his mark as an aggressive anti-union and anti-Labor radical Tory. Similarly, Joan Kirner, with less than two years in office, presided over a doomed government with courage and style.

Victoria was in many ways a special case for a long time. The undemocratic voting system, which favoured rural voters, and the Legislative Council were constant inhibitions on legislative actions.

The chapter on Kennett is called ‘Jeff Kennett: The Larrikin Metropolitan’. Insofar as the word ‘larrikin’ is accurate, Kennett had a few predecessors, including his mentor, Henry Bolte (1955–72), who was something of a rustic larrikin. Tommy Bent (1804–1909), described here as a ‘bully, bargainer and buffoon’, was certainly a larrikin and arguably a criminal as well. Each of these premiers, however, enjoyed the reputation of being a man who ‘got things done’, often by taking short cuts around established procedures. None of them was dull. They were often eulogised by those who subscribed to what Paul Rodan, author of the Hamer chapter, describes as the ‘testosterone-driven theories of leadership’. Others sailed much closer to the wind. J.B. Paterson was accused by Isaac Isaacs of creating ‘an aristocracy of criminals’, but was supported by the Argus because ‘no parliamentarian of the [Conservative] party was any more trustworthy’. James Munro (1890–91) abandoned the premiership in favour of being agent-general in London, thus avoiding angry creditors and angry electors.

The reputation of being a premier who ‘got things done’ carries the implication that others did not. For a variety of reasons, some didn’t get much done. Mostly, the issue turns on style. Hamer was a ‘civilised’ politician: ‘Victorian politics was better for that quality’, and in the life of the state, still is. John Cain Jr, ‘obstinately unpretentious and self-contained’, was a moderniser who saw policy as ‘the supreme arbiter of politics’ and had a ‘disdain for personality politics’. Both Hamer and Cain got things done, as did a number of low-key earlier premiers. Bracks is essentially in the same mould, a ‘quiet achiever’, as he is described here.

Insofar as there is a golden thread running through The Victorian Premiers, it is its illustration of how many political ideas, styles and personalities are recycled over time. But while putting these forty-four premiers together may be useful for reference purposes, the result is an indigestible book, not because of the writing but because many of our Victorian premiers have been quite boring people. To bundle them together is to do a disservice to those who were not. Reading this book from the beginning, I found myself flipping forward to Chapter 18, ‘Tom Hollway: The Bohemian’, in search of light relief. He, it seems, is ‘the most controversial Victorian Premier of the 20th Century. Intelligent, well-educated, Liberal, handsome, erratic, principled, hypochondriacal, opportunistic, sociable, secretive, charismatic, turbulent, dipsomaniacal, driven, witty and dashing, were some of the adjectives used to describe his complex personality.’ I turned back to the premiers of the 1870s with some regret.

Few politicians anywhere collect a bundle of adjectives like that. If more of them did, political biographies would be bestsellers; reading them a source of fascination. But politicians rarely oblige.