Tiberius with a Telephone by Patrick Mullins

Author:Patrick Mullins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO010000, POL055000, POL000000, BIO011000, HIS004000, POL016000
Publisher: Scribe Publications
Published: 2018-11-18T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Activity and Responsibility

1984

Even thirteen years after Gorton’s downfall, there were questions to be asked. How had it happened? Why had it happened? Bowman, swimming through the files and poring over the documents in the autumn of 1984, could not have failed to wonder about how Gorton had come to such an inglorious end. McMahon’s becoming prime minister was a pivotal moment in his life. It would be in the autobiography, too. How to explain it, though? How to understand it?

In 1971, it did not take long for the finger of blame to be pointed at the Packer press.1 Within days of Gorton’s deposal, theories about a ‘Packer plot’ to unseat him were rife. Most were based on the high visibility of the Packer-owned Australian Consolidated Press in the days preceding Gorton’s fall. Certainly, the involvement of the Packer-employed journalists Robert Baudino, Peter Samuel, and Alan Reid — the latter notoriously anti-Gorton — gave those theories credibility. The Daily Telegraph’s editorial calling on Gorton to go lent them the veneer of possibility. Reid’s pronouncement on Meet the Press about Fraser’s position lent the theories solidity. Finally, that McMahon, the most evident beneficiary of it all, was known to have been close to Packer, made it inevitable that the theory — for some people — would become fact. ‘The Prime Minister is Prime Minister as the result of a co-ordinated campaign mounted originally by Sir Frank Packer,’ the Labor member for Fremantle, Kim Beazley Snr, said within a few days.2

In the months that followed Gorton’s fall, there were many who saw proof of it everywhere. Labor, most pointedly, made much of Packer’s involvement. It dug up evidence of McMahon’s long relationship with the press tycoon, noting their association through Sydney Newspapers Ltd. Labor accused McMahon of leading a government subservient to Packer’s outside influence, of allowing the prime ministership to be but a bauble.3 ‘To Sir Frank Packer,’ Beazley said, ‘the Government of the Commonwealth is another one of his personally owned projects, like the yachts Gretel or Dame Pattie in the fight for the Americas Cup.’4

For those ‘inside’ Canberra, the theory that Packer had been the principal cause of Gorton’s fall became even more interesting when, in June 1971, The Australian Quarterly, a political science journal run from Sydney, published an anonymously authored article that betrayed an insider’s knowledge of Packer’s ACP and canvassed Packer’s involvement.5 ‘Mr Y’, as the author was called, was generous to the suggestions, noting that the idea of a ‘Packer plot’ had some plausibility. There was highly centralised editorial power within the Consolidated Press, he wrote; there was considerable co-operation between its publications; and there was Packer’s love for exercising political power. These were reasonable grounds for thinking that Gorton had been felled by the machinations of the Packer press and Packer himself.

And yet, Mr Y said, the suggestion of an orchestrated, top-down plot was far-fetched. It would have barely concerned Packer that Fraser had fallen out with the army and felt the need to brief the press.

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