Joh for PM by Paul Davey

Author:Paul Davey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NewSouth
Published: 2015-04-26T16:00:00+00:00

Sinclair was acutely aware that his Cessnock launch on Sunday 21 June was a do or die affair. If it was not well received, if the media reported it negatively, his days were numbered.

He arrived in Cessnock on the evening of Wednesday 17 June, and based himself at Peppers Guest House, in the Hunter Valley vineyards. From there he made campaigning forays into other parts of the Hunter electorate, and the adjoining electorate of Calare, also held by Labor. The bulk of his work and concentration went on at Peppers, where he worked over draft and re-draft of his speech, writing most of the final copy himself and not finalising it until late on Saturday night, 20 June. Then came the logistical problem of getting several hundred copies printed in time for release to the media and conference delegates by 11am the next day.

I had already organised a local printer to open on the weekend and do the job. Fortunately, he agreed to begin at 6am on the Sunday morning. The problem was that he did not have a collating machine, so we had to gather a band of staffers and vol-unteers to help with the necessary sorting and stapling. Given the authorisation and ‘printed by’ requirements of the Commonwealth Electoral Act, the printer’s commercial name began moving way beyond the quiet surrounds of Cessnock – into every mainland state and territory of the Commonwealth. The back page of the speech bore in bold type: ‘Printed by Goanna Press Pty Ltd., 4 Third Street, Cessnock NSW.’

Shortly before 11am on the Sunday morning, Ian Sinclair walked into the Cessnock Town Hall accompanied by his wife, Rosemary, and delivered what many regarded as one of the best speeches of his life. It had to be.

He released his 36-page Election ’87 Policy Summary booklet, containing bullet point highlights of party commitments across all portfolios, in conjunction with the speech, in which he trod a fine line on the economy, basically adopting Howard’s economic and tax policies but signalling additional areas the National Party would press as priorities in a Coalition government – areas such as an ultimate 25 per cent personal and corporate tax rate. He picked up and supported Stone’s 23 per cent working tax bonus and injected some new ideas, such as allowing tax deductibility for the first $5000 worth of interest earned on personal savings each year. To show he was not completely buckling to the Queensland policy, he maintained support for the abolition of Labor’s pensioner assets test and for the federal party’s fuel policies. He put forward the tax element of his policy in the following terms:

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