Looking for Mr Right
written by Kevin Summers, August 1999
The more things change, the more they remain the same. That cliche hit me as I descended the stairs of number four, Treasury Place, Melbourne, leaving the office of Workplace Relations and Small Business Minister, Peter Reith.
I had just spent forty minutes talking to the Minister as we sat on the comfortable chairs that dominate the centre of his large office. Over coffee we meandered over many areas, one of which was our shared educational background. We both attended Monash Law School, bidding adieu to the Clayton campus in 1973.
A quarter of a century later, Peter Reith appeared little changed; the hairline was still heading northwards and his manner of dress remained conservative, the trousers and jumpers giving way to dark business suits. I continued to favour long hair, a beard, earrings and jeans. The odd couple. Unfortunately, we both wear a few extra pounds around the midriff. Despite the weight and his slight stoop, Reith looks well. The eyes are clear and his skin is remarkably unlined.
Monash during our time was an extraordinary place. Following the upheavals emanating from the Vietnam War and conscription, students and some staff talked seriously of social and sexual liberation. Political discussion was fierce and I remember lines of student orators waiting to have their say during the lunchtime debates in the Union Building. To me the Law School seemed little affected by the fomentation. It remained something of a backwater
Reith, however, remembers the Law School as being decidedly left-wing. "There were no right-wing views there in those days," he says. "The whole system had shifted to the left. I reckon I must have been the only one there past the mid-point in political views." He maintained little interest in university affairs, taking no part in the polemic. In fact, he reckons he was politically isolated there.
Anyway, student politics was not the main game. He had joined the Sandringham Young Liberals at sixteen while a student at Brighton Grammar School, discerning that the real way to power and influence was from working within the party system. "It was a comprehensive involvement in politics. And fairly real politics as well, unlike the student Liberals," he says. "They tended to live in a world of their own. Student politics is not quite the real world."
While Monash provided me with a set of counter-culture values that I haven't been able to shake off over the years, it provided Reith with a pair of degrees (he also studied economics) and after completing his articles he headed to Phillip Island to hang out his shingle, a humble country solicitor. Within a few years he was the island's Shire President.
Surely then he had political ambitions? He gives a characteristic shrug. "Sort of ... sort of. Wasn't in a huge hurry." Yet he sought preselection for the State Assembly seat of Brighton and later the Council seat of Higinbotham. "I suppose you run for the practice," he allows. "It's a way of putting up your hand and saying you are interested."
Liberal Party powerbrokers must have noticed the Reith paw waving in the breeze as he gained endorsement for the by-election for the Federal seat of Flinders caused by the resignation of the ailing Phillip Lynch. The seat embraced not only the Mornington Peninsula but also the Westernport region, including Phillip Island. At the age of 32, he was Peter Reith MHR.
The Minister displays an engaging, almost avuncular manner as we sip our coffee. But many Australians regard him with absolute loathing. The latest union leaflets opposing his "Second Wave" of industrial relations changes feature him variously as an Egyptian mummy come to life as a menacing monster, a pirate forcing poor workers to walk the plank and a goggle-eyed fat man about to unleash ferocious wolves to prey upon a world of decent pay and conditions.
If he is worried about the escalating heat within our political landscape as evinced by last year's events on the nation's wharves then he doesn't show it. He appears to revel in his aggressive image. "You take a position and stick to it. Change is only going to happen if you're prepared to argue the case and be firm about it and have a genuine commitment to your proposal."
His confident style he concedes is the result of attention to detail. "If my opponents give a speech, I read it. I read it twice. I check it…It helps me better understand where the debate is at and how to manage it. It also means I'm ready for them in most situations."
This devotion to the minutiae pays dividends. Recently on ABC radio Reith was able to savage a critic of his workplace reforms by pointing out in strident terms that his detractor had made an error of fact. It was a minor matter but Reith played it to the hilt, undermining the man's credibility. "Get your facts right!" It's a common (and effective) Reith line.
But if the Minister is strong on detail and aware of his local critics, he is a little coy when appraising the wider impact of his workplace renovating. The man who played for high stakes on the wharves is content to see himself as a small picture man.
While many consider his workplace reform to be at the cutting edge of Australia's pursuit of a deregulated economy, the Minister won't go that far. "I've got a whole series of proposals currently in the Parliament and you can bundle it all up and say it's a shift toward a more deregulated market but, to be honest with you, these are evolutionary changes unique to Australia because of structural circumstances, the institutional framework we have."
Then he reads the international critics of globalisation? Noam Chomsky? John Ralston Saul? Well, there's not much time for reading beyond the portfolio. And what's to read? "There are not many informed academic or philosophical critics in the area with which I'm dealing." He had neatly dispensed with a couple of my heroes.
Talk to me, Peter, about the rights of the individual in the face of the rise of the massive corporations. Long pause. "Interesting as these debates are, they don't have an immediacy to what I'm doing." Back to the small picture again.
He says he's not disinterested in a philosophical debate on the wider implications; it's just that the realities of government don't allow for it. "To be honest with you, the life of Ministers is more practical. We're not into ... obviously, Cabinets have a directional policy with a certain philosophical template to it but a lot of the things you do are the more mundane, day to day things that Governments have to do."
I ask him if he's disturbed by the huge fees that senior management at Bankers Trust Australia had pocketed following the buy out by Deutsche Bank of the parent company. Some executives are reported to have entered into a $10m. "golden handcuff" deal to stay on. Don't these distortions undermine the Government's sense of morality? There's that Reith shrug again.
"Why pick on them?" he responds. "Why not say that a million bucks for Eddie McGuire seems a hell of a lot of money?" While agreeing with him on that issue I don't want to talk about a sports commentator but about a managerial class that is clearly enriching itself and seemingly answerable to no one for its actions.
"I understand people's bemusement, and sometimes anger, at what seem to be incredibly generous arrangements, where some people appear to line their pockets. These are relatively isolated cases. The real issue for the Government of the day - and John Howard has said some critical things about executive salaries - is the better management of the economy, to do something for the people who need help."
While pocket lining on a grand scale may be isolated are they not symptomatic of a general trend to greater divisions of wealth? Surely a result of free markets is the creation of a permanent underclass? I point out that 30 million Americans live below the poverty line, that they are chronically undernourished.
"I don't think that's really true of the U.S. There's greater mobility there than people in Australia understand," he muses. "You go to Europe and talk to the trade union movement and say that, gee, you've got a high rate of unemployment here compared to the U.S. and they say they don't want a permanent underclass. This is a mantra of people who are opposed to a more deregulated system."
In fact, the latest figures from the U.S. Census Bureau indicate I was wrong. The actual poverty figure is about 37 million, 48% of whom are children.
Perhaps it's a matter that the economic rationalists wish not to dwell upon. A flaw in the glass of triumphant capitalism suggesting heartless disinterest in the common good. Yet the man opposite me is not without a social conscience. His critics may be surprised to learn of his membership of Amnesty International. He is rightly proud of his initiatives to combat unemployment within the indigenous community.
He is, certainly, a zealot. He has a unshakeable belief in the benefits that will flow from the free market. And he has changed little over the years. In his maiden speech of February, 1985, Reith sang the praises of Milton Friedman. "The market place is distorted by the inefficiencies of the demands of government," he said. Too much government and not enough enlightened self-interest was the problem. Government is there to maintain "minimum standards for those people who, for one reason or another, are unable to care adequately for themselves."
He says he could walk away from politics but it's difficult to accept his diffidence. His career setbacks are well documented. "Spectacular," he states, with dry humour. Only months after Reith's by-election victory in December, 1982, Malcolm Fraser called an general election and Reith was voted out in the Hawke ascendency. He had spent exactly one day in Canberra.
He has been closely associated with the political reverses of John Howard and then John Hewson, enduring thirteen years in Opposition. Only last year some commentators were preparing to write off his future prospects following what was clearly a loss of the public relations war with the MUA.
Peter Reith just bounces back. "I've always tended to take things in my stride." His "Second Wave" proposals are on the table and he is preparing to deal with the Democrats to ensure the passage of the bulk of his legislation through the Senate. Once again he looms as a serious contender for the future Prime Ministership.
And yet his very fundamentalism is a cause for concern. He appears to have neither the time nor the inclination to reflect. His workplace reforms are changing the face of the nation, altering the way we live, the way we interact. All for the better, he insists. The market place will provide higher living standards with more disposable income. Both the service and information industries will surge.
We will be better educated, better informed. Those at the bottom of the heap will be financially better off and they will have the mobility to rise through the ranks. Peter Reith likes that word - mobility. He uses it to describe an important outcome of his reforms. Workers will be free to choose, to negotiate, to flourish.
The Minister is a smart and educated man. From private school to university to rural legal practice to politics. It is not, however, a wide life education and that he is typical of so many of our politicians is cause for disquiet. I wonder if he knows many people in the work place? Not just at the big end of town but the places where people toil and sweat and struggle to produce.
In a recent survey (1-9-98) Drake International found that 85% of businesses contacted conceded that their workplaces were stressful. They cited time constraints, massive workloads, long hours, budgetary constraints, uncertainty and job insecurity. No surprises there. Yet Peter Reith is convinced that he tends a rosy garden. "Australia is a better country than it was fifty years ago for people who are disadvantaged."
"Good to see you again," he says and I reply in kind as he escorts me from the office. I hope he meant it. I know I did. There was nothing impersonal, nothing cold, nothing heartless about him. I wish I could say the same about his brave new world ... but, hey, I'm just a bloke who hasn't had a steady job in twenty five years.
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