ANOTHER VOICE
A refuge from the Yorkshire Brezhnev and his Manchurian henchman
AUBERON WAUGH
Bored and disgusted by the general election here, I have taken refuge in the election which has been called by Austra- lia's Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke for 11 July. My reason is not only that at this distance Australian politics seem more interesting, populated by heroic and absurd figures like Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen and Andrew Peacock (of Shirley Maclaine fame), not to mention trouserless Malcolm Fraser and the secretary who walked with a wiggle and whose name was Ainsley Got- to. There is also the thought that in the unlikely event of a Hattersley-Kaufman victory over there, many people like myself will be seriously tempted to join the queue outside Australia House applying for im- migrant visas. Since it is almost certain that Hawke will win a third term, the question of what the future holds for Australia is of more than passing interest.
Some will be disposed to pooh-pooh my own apocalyptic view of the consequences of a Labour victory in Britain. We have survived Labour governments before, it is true. Every election has produced right- wing prophets of doom, who claimed that Attlee, Gaitskell, Wilson, Callaghan, Foot and now Kinnock were really Soviet citizens who had been parachuted into Britain after dark, disguised as nuns. While keeping an open mind about some of them, I have never been tempted towards what is now identifiable as the spetsnaz-scare view of British politics, and am accordingly even quite impressed by Kinnock's promise to die for his country in the Bedwelty Resist- ance in the event of Soviet occupation. But I see Hattersley and Kaufman, the York- shire Brezhnev and his Manchurian Chief of Secret Police, as sufficient reason to run for cover, the threat being all the more credible because it is entirely domestic. Kinnock, a Welsh scallywag on the make, may belong to the fantasy world of Desper- ate Dan or Lord Snooty and his Pals, but Hattersley and Kaufman are both people we all knew at school. Kaufman the Sneak could be kept in his place while he was on his own, but in alliance with the evil thug Hattersley he was invincible.
My dear Wife, who still intends to vote SDP at the election, is not so much taken with the idea of emigrating to Australia. She mutters darkly about rats who leave a sinking ship, but I have never been able to summon up great moral indignation against rats who behave in this way. It seems to me they may have the right idea. Nobody ever taught me that it was consi- dered a clever or honourable thing for anyone except the captain to stay on board a sinking ship. If socialism finally comes to Britain — as a result, in part, of the stupidity and snobbery of middle-class voters in the South of England who chose to vote Alliance — I shall be quite happy to camp by a billabong and hang up my tucker-bag under the shade of a coolibah tree. So let us examine what is happening in Australia, and how much risk there is from a Labor third term.
On the face of it, the Conservative interest, led by the Liberals' uncharismatic John Howard and the National Party's far-too-charismatic Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Prime Minister of Queensland since 1968, seems set to take a bit of a hiding. The question is what will happen to Labor if Hawke is returned for a third term of office with an increased majority. The party he leads, and has belonged to for 40 years, spent many years in a sort of Stalinist twilight. Between 1949 and 1983 Australia had solidly Conservative governments, apart from the three disastrous years of Gough Whitlam betwen 1972 and 1975. All the jolly swagmen and intellectual vagrants of the Australian Left look back on the Whitlam years as a glorious spring, but even if one disregards these people, whom- ake up a fair proportion of the Australians one is likely to meet, there can be no doubt that the Australian Labor Party shelters some pretty rough customers under its umbrella. The best indication of Hawke's attitiude to his own Left may be found in the extraordinary television interview he gave on the occasion of the fourth anniversary of his government earlier this year. The interviewer chosen by the Au- stralian Broadcasting Corporation was our old friend Mr John Pilger!!!
The Sydney Morning Herald report of the event by Mr Richard Coleman was ),..\1111
headed, 'How the Prime Minister came to be well and truly pilgered.' What hap- pened, so far as one can piece it together, was that Pilger had reframed and re- recorded his questions and his introduction after the interview, which had, through no fault of Pilger's, to be cut from 21 minutes to 9 minutes. But Pilger did the cutting himself, and in the course of it added a piece at the end showing himself alone making a speech to camera, in which he said that Mr Hawke had walked out on him, refusing to answer further questions.
Pilger: That interview was concluded with the Prime Minister getting up and leaving.
But before he left he admonished me for taking up too much time in asking questions
about inequality and poverty and concentra-
tion of media ownership. I asked if I could ask him one question about why so many Aboriginal people, the first Australians, now felt betrayed and what he would be doing for them in 1988 to effect an historic reconcilia- tion. He said he couldn't answer that ques- tion, he didn't have time, and he left.
Subsequent scrutiny of the unedited transcript, released by Mr Hawke's office. revealed that there was no such admonish- ment, there was no question about Abor- iginals, and no refusal to answer it. It was all a flight of fancy. Time simply ran out, and Hawke had to leave for another engagement.
But the Prime Minister's attitude to Pilger's questions — 'Are you not aware, Mr Hawke, that in Labor's heartland there is deep and quite remarkable disillusion- ment with your government . . . ? Just this week we were told that one in five Austra- lian children live below the poverty line. How do you justify this?' — was reassuring enough. Compared to Hattersley, Kauf- man and Kinnock, Mr Hawke seems a highly principled, straightforward man with his head screwed on.
Now Pilger has returned to Britain to complete a three-part serial for Central Television in celebration of Australia's bicentenary. It, too, will be shown by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and will once again argue the case for returning to the Aboriginals all those hundreds of thousands of square miles which their ancestors once hunted or grazed or just used for rolling over and over in. I don't think Australians have much to be worried about. They will survive a third term of Hawke more surely than we will survive a single term of Hattersley-Kaufman.
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