Paul Keating - The Bankstown boy

The one who became Prime Minister of Australia? 

Well let me tell you!

 

Do you want to know what happened when my old mate, the then Immigration Minister,  Nick Bolkus, suggested we meet the boss in his office back in 1992?  With the expletives removed (Geez he can swear) it went something like this...........

 

 

Keating the free-trader wasn't in battle mode when I met him that first time in the Oval Office.  He was polite and typically forthright, but he didn't ask me a single question.  He wasn't a bloke to ask questions.  It was as if everything worth knowing, the myths on the lap of Jack Lang, the economics from the pointy heads in Treasury, was already known, acquired along the way. 

   

`Arrogant bastard, but at least he doesn't put people down the way Hawke did.  Even Graeme Campbell, who hates Keating, is treated with respect in the Caucus,' my insider had explained.  

"All right, then I'll ask a few questions," I said to myself as I waited impatiently for the opening.  

"What about deregulating the banking sector and selling off public assets, isn't that part of the conservative agenda?" I asked.  

 

The moment the word `banking' was uttered Keating was away.  

"There was my father all prepared to invest in a Malaysian project and he's got this officious, small-minded bank manager who won't lend him the money," he said, the words passing through the lips as easily as the lyrics of a favourite song.  He's been here before, I thought.  

"My father would have been exporting to Asia if that suburban bank clerk hadn't been so powerful.  It was a joke, really.  That was old, regulated, inward-looking Australia.  That's why we deregulated the financial market and floated the dollar.  Allowing some halfwit bank manager to control the flow of money was fucking bullshit."  

 

"Is that the real reason why you deregulated the banking system?" I wanted to ask.  

"Competition is the way to force them to behave themselves," he said.  

By the time Keating's policies had reached fruition the Commonwealth Bank had gone private, the National Australia Bank was reporting a $1.97 billion profit, and small depositors were being driven out of savings banks in a manner which made Christ's performance in the temple pale into insignificance.

Keating, the smart alec disciple of modernity, was no radical.    

 

 

NED KELLY

 

The Irish-Australian bushranger larrikin from Greta, Ned Kelly, had drawn a pistol for his assault on the rural citadels of capitalism, the Jerilderie and Euroa banks.  Faithful to the pounding words of his `Jerilderie Letter', a treatise so radical the authorities buried it from the public gaze for a generation, it was the "widows and orphans and poor of the Greta district" who dined on the proceeds of Kelly's assault on the State.  

Ned Kelly knew the banks were an agent of the pastoral company and the `big-wig' urban financiers in their war against the small settler.  For Jack Lang and Frank Anstey and the old guard of the ALP, as it was for Ned, the banks represented the worst of avaricious capitalism.  By contrast Treasurer Paul Keating, the symbol of new modern Labor, carried only personal, not ideological, enmity towards the money-lenders.  Curtin and Chifley had wanted to control them, Keating only wanted to see them squirm under the pressure of market forces. 

 

When the Kellys from Tipperary and their sympathisers gathered around Jones' Hotel at Glenrowan on that foggy, fateful night in 1880, they'd already settled on a Republic.  There was nothing to argue about; the Crown was a symbol of oppression, pure and simple.  It would take another 115 years before the boy from Tynagh, County Galway, stormed the Australian Parliament to deliver his ode to the Australian Republic.

 

Yet Kelly's outpourings said far more about national sovereignty and the source of power and privilege in Australia than did Keating's offerings.  Keating wanted to change the Head of State, Kelly wanted a just state.  In the heat of battle Keating remembered bank managers.  At Jerilderie the bushranger's words were saved for avaricious squatters and British tyranny...  

 

 

 

 

GERRY ADAMS

 

I'd met Adams on a cold, grey Easter Monday in Belfast in 1994. ….             After the pleasantries were completed I was led to a small upstairs room.  The Irish News poster, "Sinn Fein shrugs off bomb attack", plastered on the wall adjoining the street explained why the upstairs windows had been replaced by bricks and mortar.  The Loyalist enemy had fired a rocket at the building only a few days earlier. 

 

 

For all the vilification and misrepresentation he received at the hands of the British press Adams was remarkably conciliatory. 

"What we're looking for is for London and Dublin to come to an agreement to end the partition of the country and to do so in terms of a process around an agreed timeframe and to do so in consultation with all parties. And we're mindful that the Unionists especially, know they're a very large section of our people, are hostile to all of these ideas and want to protect their own position.  They're victims of the history of the place.  So it should be done in a way that seeks to get their participation and their fullest involvement," he said. 

  

 

For someone whose life was in constant danger and in whom travelled the impassioned aspirations of a tribe dispossessed but unconquered since the Treaty of 1921, he was astonishingly calm.  At the time of our meeting, Sinn Fein and the IRA were in protracted discussions about a ceasefire.  Two years after its declaration, in the wake of British intransigence, uncompromising Republicans such as Bernadette Devlin were accusing Sinn Féin of being duped just as Collins and his Party had been 75 years earlier.

 

  As told in my book, Cleary Independent, published by HarperCollins in 1998.