Fit to Print: Inside the Canberra Press Gallery (Reportage (Sydney, Australia).)

Fit to Print Inside the Canberra Press Galler y

R E P O RTAG E

MARGARET SIMONS

Fit to Print Inside the Canberra Press Galler y

UNSW PRESS

A UNSW Press book Published b y University of New South Wales Press Ltd University of New South Wales Sydney 2052 Australia www.unswpress.com.au © Margaret Simons 1999 First published 1999 This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Simons, Margaret, 1960– . Fit to print: inside the Canberra Press Gallery. ISBN 0 86840 649 X. 1. Australia. Parliament—Reporters and reporting. 2. Commonwealth Parliamentary Press Gallery (Australia). 3. Government and the press—Australia. 4. Journalism—Political aspects—Australia. 5. Press and politics—Australia. 6. Journalists—Australian Capital Territory—Canberra. I. Title. (Series: Reportage). 070.4493240994 Printer BPA, Melbourne Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the relevant copyright, designs and patents acts, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publisher. eBooks Corporation

Contents Preface

vii

1

Watching

1

2

Telling

33

3

Feeling

61

4

Seeing

97

Notes

115

To C l a r e a n d L a c h l a n

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Preface This book contains the names and references to the contributions of many of the people who have helped in its creation, and the footnotes acknowledge other debts. Some whose contribution is not evident include Morag Fraser, editor of Eureka Street, who first showed confidence that this sort of book might be worth publishing, and Peter Browne of University of New South Wales Press, who was hot on her heels, and who was also a sensitive editor and critic. The Cole-Adams family, particularly Kate, gave me support, practical help and many insights, and saved my sanity in 1998. Rolf Reed-Maiwald helped me to think and see more clearly. Amanda Lohrey has been important in so many ways I lose count. David Armstrong, editor in chief of the Australian, was the one who got me into the gallery—an unusual and brave decision, and one I hope he doesn’t regret. Jack Waterford read the manuscript at a late stage, to check for factual errors. Lastly there were many journalists who were interviewed off the record, and several others who cannot be publicly acknowledged, but who encouraged and helped me to research and write this book. Very rarely did this coincide with their best interests, and I thank them for their courage, selflessness, and belief in the potential of reporting.

Margaret Simons

1 Watching My family and I drove to the national capital on an autumn Sunday afternoon past smooth hills, cork-screwed with the futile tracks that sheep make, the grass chewed close to the ground. I was sitting in the back, my babies on either side. Four-month-old Lachlan was asleep. Clare, nearly two, needed to be. I pretended to nod off, hoping she would mimic me, and she did. Too well. Head on one side, eyelashes brushing her cheek. But when I opened my eyes to peek at her I found she was watching me back. Little lizard eyes—a slit of wet between the lids, and a smile at the game we were playing. Slowly, slowly, her eyes fell all the way shut. Then the flicker, and a wicked laugh when she caught me watching. So we continued. Pretending to sleep. Pretending not to watch. Catching each other out. Watching me, watching you, while the capital grew closer and the road hummed and the gum trees were sketches of grey on pasty margarine-yellow. The pretence took over. At last she turned inward and was sunk in her imprecise two-year-old dreams, her limbs abandoned to gravity, the job of watching left to me. I was still watching as we rolled out of buggered-up sheep country and into the low-rise office-block city, towards the clean, green mound of Parliament House. There are four doors to Parliament House. Four eyes looking out from under the turf. The public entrance at the front, hardly ever used by the people who work there, is for tourists and for show. The Senate side door is to the west and the House of Representatives door to the east, but the real ‘eye’ of Parliament House is the Ministerial Entrance, which is at the back. When you see a minister on television they are likely to be standing at the Ministerial Entrance. When the Leader of the National Party, Tim Fischer, spoke to the media after One Nation’s success in the Queensland state election, he checked the fall of the afternoon light and asked cameramen if they would mind reversing the normal angle of the shot so that gum trees, rather than the façade of Parliament House, appeared in the back-

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ground. It is, after all, called the ‘bush capital’. The Ministerial Entrance is where they do ‘doorstops’, which is the modern substitute for a sit-down press conference. Once upon a time a doorstop meant being caught unprepared by a watchful media. These days they are rather like the spontaneous demonstrations in Orwell’s Animal Farm. Doorstops are announced by press release. The advantage for the politician is that they can always walk away. The Ministerial Entrance is set up for the exercise. There are special boxes set into the pillars. Open them up, and there are all the plugs and special power points the television crews need to broadcast to the nation. This then, is the eye—or one of them. Half open, half closed. Playing the game.

O Years ago when I was a journalist on the Age, career advice was given in the pub after ambition and envy had been softened and sentimentalised by the wash of beer. It was in the pub that the editor surprised me one night by saying that I was a journalist in mid-career. I was only 25, and had rather fancied I was still at the beginning. ‘Career paths are shorter these days’, he said. He told me that if I wanted to amount to anything in journalism, I must go to Canberra and learn how government worked. Canberra used to mean many things in those days, but never only the city. In the headlong rush to deadline in the evening, you would hear the newsdesk say ‘Canberra is filing’ or ‘Canberra thinks … ’ In the pub, you would discuss what ‘we’, meaning the paper, should be doing, followed by complaints that ‘There’s too much Canberra’, or ‘Canberra is out of touch’. In this context ‘Canberra’ meant our bureau, and usually, a single person—chief political correspondent Michelle Grattan, a woman with fuse-wire hair, thick glasses and hunched shoulders, legendary for her capacity for hard work and her alleged lack of a personal life. There were so many stories about Michelle. One night

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when she was madly typing, a pen firmly between her teeth, a drunken sub-editor was supposed to have drawn out his penis and laid it on the desk in front of her with a suggestion that this was what she really needed. ‘Put it away cobber’, she was meant to have said, without a pause. ‘Put it away’. There was another story about how she had, many times, sat by the bedside of a colleague’s dying child. They say Michelle used to read her fairy stories. Lots of people told you this story, and they would always begin by saying: ‘Not many people will tell you this about Michelle, but ... ’ I wonder if any of the stories were true? One thing I know is true, because I heard it from so many people. Michelle would ring at all times of the day and night. She would haul people out of bed to query them on the finer points of some piece of proposed legislation. She would sit outside meetings until the small hours of the morning, just to buttonhole the people coming out. She worked harder and longer than anyone else. My own Michelle story comes from the time she visited Brisbane during the 1987 election campaign to report on the ‘Joh for PM’ push. I was the Brisbane correspondent, which meant that it was my job for those few days to look after Michelle—a woman oddly incompetent in dealing with the minutiae of life, such as driving, and finding lunch. On Friday afternoon she worked all day in the office writing her column. She was like a composer at work on a hurried symphony, or like a tightrope walker—trying to excite, while not putting a foot wrong. She took such care with each word. There were a dozen phone calls to trusted sources. ‘Cobber, can I use that thing we were talking about?’ And they would negotiate what she could use, and how, and who might guess the source, and how to confuse them in their guessing. Minutes away from deadline she handed me her portable computer and asked me to file the article for her. The technology was complicated in those days. I had to upload it into my personal computer, then file by telephone from that. I pressed the wrong button. I lost the lot. I still remember sitting there, watching the screen blink at me. and wondering what to do. I considered harakiri. I considered walk-

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ing into the musky Brisbane night and never returning—going troppo—leaving the world of journalism behind. I considered blaming the computer technicians. But after a minute or two I went to Michelle and told her what I had done. She blinked. Once. Twice. Then she said: ‘Well I’d better rewrite it then.’ She rang the sub-editors to let them know her column would be late, never mentioning whose fault this was, and she re-wrote that column in twenty minutes flat and never said another word to me about it. To junior reporters like me, Michelle was a collection of such stories. That day in Brisbane I loved her. But usually, we felt for her the mixed admiration and resentment that those making their way up, those determined to change things, will always feel for those who have already arrived and who are not yet ready to leave. In time she fell victim to all that. There was a new editor—a man not that much older than me. He used to have conversations like the ones we had in the pub—too much Canberra, too much Michelle. All the grand things we would do when we were grown up. It was said at the time that there were only two types of ambition in Australian journalism. There were those who wanted to leave and write novels, and those who wanted to be editor of the Age. I was one of the former. He was one of the latter, and he achieved his ambition. This man had new ideas about how the Canberra bureau should be run. Michelle opposed him, and threatened to resign. The editor was heard to ruminate on whether Michelle was really necessary to the paper. These ponderings staggered the old-timers—meaning those over 45—who heard them. Michelle left, became editor of the Canberra Times, and many Age people left with her. This was the beginning of the Age diaspora. But that is part of a bigger story—the story of my generation of readers and writers, and what we have done to Australian journalism. I never took my editor’s advice to go to Canberra. I used to take pride in saying that it was a career ambition of mine to avoid the capital. I presented this as principle, but each time the opportunity was presented it was really some doomed love affair or personal timidity, a cleaving to the intimacy of the office I knew and those who knew me, that kept me in Melbourne. Now, twelve years later, my editor had been proved right. At 25

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I had been mid career and now that career was behind me. At last I was in Canberra, but this time I was there to watch the watchers. I had enough contacts, former colleagues and friends to get a security pass and a desk and for people to talk to me. Not enough, I thought, to be compromised by what I was sure was a club. The truth is of course that as soon as you get in touch with old friends you are compromised. They were good to me. They fetched me coffee, invited my family for dinner, played with my babies, spoke freely and looked offended when it became clear I meant to quote them. Michelle Grattan’s first words to me were: ‘You don’t happen to want a cat do you? I found this kitten wandering around outside Parliament House last night, all alone, so I took it in. But you see, I have dogs … ’ And so sometimes I found myself wanting to pull my punches. Wanting to be nice. ‘The reason Graham Richardson was so powerful was because he did things for people. He is a very nice man’, said Fia Cumming, chief political correspondent for the Sun-Herald. Fia Cumming was co-author of the first article published that named the man, formerly a student of Cheryl Kernot’s, with whom she had had an affair.1 Was that a legitimate story? I asked. ‘Absolutely’, she replied. A little later, she asked me to treat what she had told me about her personal life ‘sensitively’. And I have. It was here. I have cut it out. But I do understand the temptations. I understand the temptation to put personal matters on the front page. Margo Kingston, correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald, said in one of her articles about the whispers that were circulating in corridors when the Liberal leadership was up for grabs: ‘Journalists can only tell you what’s really going on in code. Politicians only talk to us because both sides play by strict rules. We can’t tell you directly what they really say. ‘We must solemnly report bogus pledges of loyalty and hypocritical media bashing. With this type of story, it is absolutely necessary to slant stories one way or the other, that is, engage in some comment in news pieces, to give the public an inkling of what’s going on. And to write unsourced comment pieces going as far as we can to explain, as far as we know, what we have judged might be hap-

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pening.’2 What Kingston was saying, what Cumming was appealing to, what we all know, is that to be part of a community is to make alliances and compromises. In Canberra’s Parliament House work the politicians, the political staff, and the media. No other Western democracy concentrates so much power in one building. And just as in any other office there are all the minutia, the unexamined bonding that come with shared space and shared lives. There are notices in the tearooms for people to wash up their mugs. There are photos of parties on the wall. There are shared jokes, shared views. There is all the trivial knowledge of how the office works—the length of time it takes after selecting your floor before the lift doors will close and when the queues will be shortest at the coffee shop; knowledge of who is in and who is out, how any particular person is to be regarded, and whose blood is in the water; what it means, and what you should do, when a bell rings in the corridors, or when a certain person appears by your desk; how to behave, and the limits of acceptable eccentricity. These are the things that define who is an insider, and who is not. This is what makes a community work, what makes it strong and effective. It is also what excludes outsiders, and inhibits change. In these things, the press gallery’s politics are like those of any other office. But this is not just any office. The whole rationale for having a press gallery is to allow journalists to get close to politicians; to form alliances, to push and blur the lines between public and private; to swap confidences and find out what is going on; to gain trust—which means that trust must not be betrayed. These people are watching for us, for those of us on the outside.

O It is nine o’clock on the morning of 16 February 1998. Australia is poised to send troops to a foreign war. The High Court is shortly to make a decision on whether the Government is able to pass racist laws. The Federal Parliament is considering the Wik legislation. The

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Government is talking of changing the way we are taxed. The preceding week, Cheryl Kernot, Labor MP-to-be, has attacked journalists for intruding into her private life, writing about her twenty-year-old affair with her former school student. It has been said, in various columns and letters to the editor and even in editorials, that something has changed in the way the Australian media do their work—that they are more willing than ever to intrude into the personal. The offices of the parliamentary press gallery take up the whole of the second floor of the Senate side of Parliament House. This is a place of gleaming parquet corridors and pink carpet. At this hour the offices of the nation’s media companies are mostly deserted. Only a few junior radio journalists are on duty. Meanwhile, Parliament House is being manicured. The high windows are being cleaned with mops specially designed for the nooks and crannies. The lawns and garden courtyards are flawless. Specially designed mowers are used to mow between the flagstones. The drink fountains are being stocked with cardboard cups. In the four weeks I spend in Canberra, I never find a drink fountain that is not adequately stocked with cardboard cups. It is so unusual, these days, for a public building to be properly maintained that this adequacy feels like excess. And all this work is done unobtrusively in these early hours, when the rush to the six o’clock news is still a long way away, and the television monitors on the second floor of the Senate side of Parliament House, normally used to watch Senate Committee hearings or the proceedings of Parliament, are tuned to Humphrey B Bear. The heavy-hitters of the gallery are still in bed, or eating toast, or in their dressing gowns reading the newspapers and listening to AM, or feeling guilty about not reading the papers and not listening to AM, because they are trying to juggle the rest of their lives. Laura Tingle has just resigned as chief political correspondent for the Age. This is the third time she has changed employer in the last five years, but she has moved a total of about 25 metres along the pink corridors. This morning she has no job to go to, and has dozed off listening to AM, and woken just in time to hear ‘ … and now in financial news … ’ Her husband is Alan Ramsey. Once he was a Michelle Grattan

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equivalent; a God correspondent. Now he writes a twice-weekly column for the Sydney Morning Herald. For once she won’t have to give him her standard line about why she has to go in early. ‘Some of us have to file more than twice a week, darling.’ Margo Kingston, correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald and the gallery’s token radical, is sitting at home playing solitaire and chewing nicorettes. Her career at the Herald seems stalled. She is invited regularly on to ABC Radio to give commentary on politics, but is restricted from doing so in her own paper. ‘Do I want to be a hack all my life?’ she is asking herself. She won’t make it into the office much before lunchtime. Michelle Grattan is struggling to cope with her dogs, and the kitten. Laurie Oakes, political editor for the Nine Network—who knows what Laurie Oakes is doing? Ask anyone in the gallery, or any of the political minders, who they believe to be the leading journalist, and they all say ‘Laurie Oakes’. He breaks the stories—about Hawke’s Kirribilli agreement with Keating to hand over the Prime Ministership, and more recently about ministerial abuses of expense accounts—all manner of stories. The Prime Minister appears frequently with Oakes on the Sunday program. Oakes writes a column for the Bulletin. ‘Laurie is something of an amateur anarchist’, says Russell Barton, political editor for the ABC. ‘If Laurie turns up to a doorstop, your heart sinks’, says Innes Willox, press officer for Alexander Downer. ‘If Laurie mutters “That was bullshit” after your press conference, you know you are done for’, says one of the Prime Minister’s press secretaries. What does Laurie do before the working day begins? One imagines his great soft body contained in a silk dressing gown, his survey of the papers lordly and detached; perhaps his wife is nagging him; perhaps he is walking out to the compost bin, a bowl of kitchen rubbish in his hand; perhaps he is playing the glockenspiel. I don’t know how Laurie Oakes spends his mornings, because he wouldn’t talk to me. ‘I don’t want to talk about the press gallery’, he said to me in his office on the second floor of the Senate side of Parliament House. ‘I hate the press gallery.’ ‘Is there anything I can say that will change your mind?’

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‘No.’ Catherine McGrath, diplomatic correspondent for the ABC, is juggling as usual. McGrath is a mother—one of the few able to remain in the mainstream of reporting. She can only do this thanks to a husband with flexible hours. Once, when McGrath was South-East Asian correspondent based in Singapore, she, her child and her husband had planned to attend a two-year-old’s birthday party. McGrath didn’t make it, because she had been imprisoned by the Malaysian Government: shut in a cell with seven other women, an open ‘squat’ toilet and no toilet paper. She was denied access to lawyers and the Australian consulate. She was eventually released. Her two-year old was glad to have her back, but not all that alarmed. Mummy is often called away. Once she had caught up on sleep, McGrath was amazed to find that the Australian media had made her the story, rather than the hundred or so other people who had been imprisoned. ‘Isn’t the media silly?’ she thought. So there they all are, reading or not reading the papers, and this morning is unusual, because the Australian has broken a story.3 The environment writer, Stephen Lunn, has documents released under the Freedom of Information legislation showing that the money raised from the sale of part of Telstra, which was to be used for National Heritage Trust environmental projects, has nearly all been spent in Liberal and National Party seats. The distribution of money is decided exclusively by Robert Hill and John Anderson, the Ministers for Environment and Primary Industries respectively. It looks like the equivalent of the sports-rorts affair that saw Ros Kelly sacked when Labor was in power, but as usual things aren’t so clear. By ten o’clock in the morning there are already notices on the board in the press gallery. One announces a press conference to be held at 11.30 am in Hobart by the Shadow Minister for the Environment, Duncan Kerr. ‘Revelations in today’s Australian … is [sic] prima facie evidence of rorting on a grand scale’, it says. Another notice announces that Hill will hold a press conference in Cairns. This noticeboard is at an important part of the second floor of the Senate side of Parliament House. Look at the board, and you get an idea of what is happening that day. Today, as well as the notices announcing Hill’s and Kerr’s press conferences, there is a letter from

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the Smith Family thanking the press gallery for raising $2000 to buy Christmas presents for needy children. Someone has written above it: ‘Cheryl, the Media aren’t all bad.’ Opposite the noticeboard are the boxes into which press releases are distributed. Every media organisation has one. In fact, some media organisations exist only for the purpose of having a box and channelling the information that lands in it to paying clients. On the walls next to the boxes are two locked wooden frames, where the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition post their media schedules for the day. Now the reporters are arriving for work and gathering around the noticeboard and the boxes. Michelle is still looking for a home for that kitten. Someone else is complaining about Hill’s ‘presser’. ‘Ten minutes notice of something happening in Cairns. What are we meant to do? Beam up Scotty?’ In the Australian office, telephone calls are being made about Lunn’s scoop. Bureau chief, Dennis Shanahan, rings the Sydney office to talk about the follow-up, and someone else calls Lunn to persuade him to come in. Lunn is meant to start holidays today before being transferred to the Melbourne office. He wasn’t planning to come in. He puts these plans aside, and arrives at his desk. At midday the television monitors in the press gallery offices are broadcasting talk-show hostess Kerri-Anne Kennerley. Her guest is John Pasquerelli, former head of staff for Pauline Hanson, and once a familiar sight wandering the corridors of the second floor of the Senate side of Parliament House. He has just published a book on his former boss. The gallery members gather round the monitors. KerriAnne accuses Pasquerelli of being a liar. The gallery roars and claps. She does it again, and they cheer. Meanwhile, one of the Government’s media minders is leaning over Lunn as he writes his follow-up story. They laugh together. As the minder walks away, Lunn says: ‘So the PM’s office says for the record that Senator Robert Hill is very lucky to have his job today’, then laughs. The ministerial minder grins, and walks on. Is it a joke? It must be, another reporter says when I tell them this later in the day. Nobody is suggesting that Hill is on the skids. Later, another reporter tells me: ‘If Hill was being shafted, the Prime Minister’s office would never handle it that way. It wouldn’t be done that way. That’s just not how things are done. There would be

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a press conference, or else they’d brief Glenn Milne or Laurie Oakes or something, and they’d write about it in their columns, and then we’d all know, and kind of factor it in’. And I wonder, about how things are done, and what gets quoted and what does not, on the second floor of the Senate side of Parliament House. One o’clock, and a notice goes up on the board announcing that Anderson will have a ‘doorstop’ at the Ministerial Entrance at three. When the time comes, cameras are packed up and carted down. A long, loose crocodile of notebook-carrying reporters makes its way down the lifts and through the corridors. They are talking among themselves. There is a party on Saturday night. Not everyone can go. It has been called at short notice. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry’, says the hostess. ‘One day I’ll get my act together.’ There is a divergence of opinion on the Australian’s story. The transcript of a radio interview given by Hill on the issue has already been circulated in the boxes. ‘I can’t be held responsible for the fact that the Labor Party’s only got three bush seats as opposed to forty Coalition. That’s somebody else’s problem’, he had said. ‘Good yarn’, says a commercial radio reporter. ‘Yeah.’ ‘Not a bad line of Hill’s though. When you’ve got all the rural seats, you should get most of the money.’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Good yarn though.’ ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ The camera operators set up little stepladders at the Ministerial Entrance. This is so they will be able to get several angles of the Minister talking—from eye level, from knee level (they drop, almost as one, to their knees), and from above. The Minister comes out, and says that the story is an outrageous beat up, that the money is most needed in rural areas, which just happen to be Coalition seats. He also says that there was no need for the Australian to use documents obtained under Freedom of Information legislation. The complete documentation on how the grants were decided is available for anyone to see. The Minister walks off. The camera operators pack up their stepladders and unplug their cameras from the pillars of Parliament

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House. Anderson’s press secretary is busy handing round flow charts of the grant-awarding, decision-making process. He spruiks them. ‘Flow diagrams, flow diagrams, excellent for radio’, and everyone laughs. Then the crocodile of reporters wends its way back to the second floor of the Senate side, chatting all the while, agreeing, between talk of coffee and head colds and office gossip, what the good quotes were. Now it is nearly five o’clock. The six o’clock newses are almost in the can. Phone calls are made. Coffee is drunk. Boxes are checked. I am sitting in a corner of the Australian office, buried in press clippings, when I sense that something is going on. There is a rustling, an organising on the second floor of the Senate side of Parliament House. People are moving fast. They are excited. What is it? I don’t know the tides of this place well enough to tell. I wander out into the pink corridor and see film crews urgently lugging equipment. I catch a glimpse of Michelle Grattan’s blue dress disappearing down the corridor. Michelle will know what is happening. I set out to follow her. Down the pink carpeted corridor. Down a white staircase, along more parquet, round a corner, through heavy glass doors high enough to allow access for giants. Down another corridor. She keeps getting ahead of me, but always there is that glimpse of the blue dress, the click of her heels on the parquet. I am beginning to feel as though I am in a movie, some thriller or Mediterranean love story— The Pursuit of the Woman in Blue or Alice in Wonderland following the white rabbit, our heels clicking the refrain: ‘I’m late. I’m late. For a very important date. … ’ Then suddenly we are in a cool stone courtyard, and it is clear that we have arrived. A circle of reporters is grouped around the heavy wooden doors at the far end. Almost directly above is the giant Australian flag that sits at the apex of Parliament House, and on either side of the wooden doors there is another, normal sized flag. There is a lectern in the middle, and the flags are spaced just the right distance from the lectern to appear in any shot of the speaker. This is a courtyard of stone and water. A fountain surrounds a four-humped sculpture in the middle. Wisteria covers trellises on either side, but the green barely softens the stone. Later I find out it is called the Prime Minister’s courtyard. His car drives straight in

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here, when he doesn’t want a doorstop and does want to avoid the media. Increasingly, it is also used for media conferences. Now Michelle and I are clip-clopping across to join the group. A man in a suit and tie comes up to me. ‘Who are you?’ he demands ‘Margaret Simons. Who are you?’ ‘I am the Prime Minister’s press secretary. What organisation do you represent?’ ‘None.’ I tell him I am based in the Australian bureau. He looks at me. This, I realise, is Tony O’Leary. I had told one of my reporter friends that I hoped to interview him. They had snorted. ‘Getting him to talk. That would be the thing.’ Now I expect to be expelled, but he moves on, looking back at me suspiciously. He looks like a plain-clothes cop. Clearly ingratiation is not his job. Nor his talent. Now the Prime Minister is standing at the lectern and he is announcing that tomorrow our troops will leave for what looks like it is going to be another Gulf War. The Prime Minister says he knows that all Australians will wish them Godspeed. But now in any case there is no time. The press conference was called just in time to make the six o’clock newses, not in time for the reporters to gather any dissenting opinion. In the public areas of Parliament House the last tourists are leaving. The sun sets. The lights come on. Clatter clatter go the keyboards on the second floor of the Senate side of Parliament House. Now the six o’clock newses are playing. ‘Godspeed’ say the little topic boxes behind the heads of the television announcers. Then the television offices gradually empty. In the newspaper offices, the clatter continues for an hour or two. Deadlines are later for print journalists, though not as late as they used to be. Technology, which should make it possible to be more immediate, has instead somehow managed to make newspapers more like reflections and annotations of the previous night’s television news which, of course, those involved in newspaper production rarely have time to watch. By mid-evening the newspaper offices fall quiet, and the gallery goes home. ‘Godspeed’ says the headline on the Daily Telegraph the next day. Meanwhile, the Australian is the only paper to comprehensively

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follow up on the National Heritage Trust story. The Age carries a small item poo-pooing it. The Financial Review and the ABC carry straight reports of the allegations, and the Government’s response. Most commercial television newses do not cover the story. I am told the rule is only one story from Canberra per day on commercial television news. The war was it. By the end of the week, the National Heritage story is dead. The next day, I ask Margo Kingston how the gallery suddenly knew about Howard’s press conference. I had seen no announcement, heard no telephone calls. ‘They probably rang the bells’, she said. She tells me that when something urgent—or fake urgent—is happening, the people putting press releases into the boxes or posting notices on the board ring a bell so that everyone on the second floor of the Senate side will know to go down and have a look. Although I hadn’t noticed it, apparently the bells were rung ten minutes before Howard’s press conference to announce the departure of Australians for a foreign war. ‘The bells, the bells’, I say, doing my Hunchback of Notre Dame impression. Margo doesn’t smile. I ask her why there were no questions about other stories, such as Stephen Lunn’s National Heritage scoop. She replies: ‘I wasn’t there. But sometimes with things like that, important things, like war, there is sort of an understanding that other minor domestic matters won’t intrude. It just isn’t done.’ The next week, I do two interviews with Government media minders. Innes Willox was once my chief of staff on the Age. Now he manages the media for Alexander Downer. He says that sometimes, when someone in the gallery breaks a story, the rest of the gallery kills it. There is a bias against breaking ranks. ‘Last year Lindsay Murdoch on the Age broke a story about Downer supposedly not paying duty on some cigars he brought into the country.4 It wasn’t a story. He didn’t have to pay the duty. But when I woke up and read that story, I thought, “Bugger, there goes my week”. I thought I’d have to spend the whole week killing that story. But when I went up to the gallery and began to talk to people, I found they had already killed it. The reporters on other

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papers were calling it a beat up. They were quite sympathetic to me. I didn’t have to do a thing. They killed it for me.’ He pauses. ‘The gallery kills its own.’ My second interview was with John Anderson’s press secretary. He spent a lot of time explaining how he handles different media. He writes two press releases on many issues—one for the country media, and one for the boxes in Canberra. ‘The gallery can interpret political-speak. The bush can’t.’ He also said his minister was often frustrated at not being able to get on the six o’clock news. Rural issues rarely made good television, but soon they were going to have an item about sniffer dogs at airports. ‘Cute dogs, cute minister. That will make it.’ The big success story of the previous year had been an announcement of drought assistance grants. The press secretary had organised the media conference on a Sunday, on a farm property near Queanbeyan, and many of the Sunday-rostered gallery members had attended. The Minister had copped some flak, he said, for holding the conference near Canberra, rather than somewhere like Longreach, where the money was actually going to be sent. ‘I told him: “Do you expect the gallery to decamp to Longreach?” No. And the fact is that we got on all the newses that night, which we wouldn’t have done any other way.’ I asked whether any reporters had asked to see the documentation on the National Heritage grants that both Anderson and Hill had said was available to anyone who asked. Not one reporter had asked for it. ‘Can I see it?’, I said. His eyebrows went up. ‘Well, it’s a huge volume of stuff, you know. Very dull.’ ‘But I can see it?’ ‘I’ll have to check. Did he really say that? Did he really say it was available?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Um. I wasn’t aware of that.’

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Margo Kingston was one of only two people I wanted to interview who I had warned of my arrival in Canberra. I knew she would tell me the gossip. Kingston is not only a reporter, but also a player of the game of politics. She talks quite plainly about how various stories she has written have influenced the course of events. Other reporters don’t put it this way. They talk about ‘breaking’ news. This means they publish something first. Sometimes the breaking news is a leak of a report or an opinion due to be released anyway. Breaking it simply means getting it first. Other times, breaking news means publishing something that would otherwise remain secret, like Laurie Oakes’ stories about ministers’ abuse of expense accounts. But reporters rarely examine, let alone talk about, how they decide what to break and what to let lie. Kingston is what a journalist ought to be. Indiscreet. How does the press gallery cope with her? ‘I think the structuralists think I am probably a good person to have around.’ ‘The structuralists?’ ‘The ones who think about the whole animal of the gallery. They would think that I fill a positive role.’ To others, she is anathema. One of her former bosses said to me: ‘Ah Margo. Yes we were always talking about how to manage Margo, but of course the truth is she is quite unmanageable. But then she does break stories’. And Innes Willox said to me: ‘Margo will pick up stories that nobody else will touch. She must have the hide of a rhinoceros to do that in this place’. I got to know Margo when we both worked out of the Fairfax newspapers office in Brisbane. She was writing for the Times on Sunday and I was correspondent for the Age. She was a chain smoker—impossibly thin, impossibly pale— always dropping cigarette ash over my desk while she asked for my opinion on some event of the day. She didn’t always listen to my reply. If I got angry with her, she would just blink, and keep talking. She sat at her computer all folded up like a tortured paperclip, and tapped away. She was at once the most vulnerable person I have ever known, and the most undentable. I liked her immensely, which does

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not at all conflict with the fact that there were times when she was hard to stand. When the Times on Sunday folded, Margo moved to the Sydney Morning Herald, where she got wrapped up in a story that now features in textbooks on journalistic ethics as an example of what not to do. A young reporter, Tony Hewett, enrolled fraudulently in a high school to write a voyeuristic account of the life of the other students. Neither the students nor the headmaster of the school were told that he was a reporter. Hewett told the headmaster that he had moved to New South Wales after the break-up of his parents’ marriage, and was living with his married sister. Margo Kingston posed as Hewett’s married sister, and enrolled him in the school. Hewett made friends with the school students. He was invited to their parties. When they drank in the local pub, he bought them drinks, although they were underage, and he was supposed to be as well. When the controversy over the story first broke I was still working in Brisbane. Margo and Hewett had been attacked in Parliament.5 She turned up in Brisbane under so much pressure I was sure she would fly apart. She asked me what I thought of the story, which at that stage she was defending on public interest grounds. I told her I thought she had behaved unethically. I still remember the set of her jaw. I think she was close to tears, but she argued with me about the people’s right to know. Vulnerable. Undentable. Now, ten years later, Margo and I meet at Aussies, the coffee shop in the non-public area of Parliament House where ministers, reporters and office workers queue together for their excellent cappuccinos in a self-conscious show of camaraderie, an elite sort of egalitarianism. I have just come from another staged doorstop event, where everyone was polished and reasonable. Margo is late, depressed, in a T-shirt and a waistcoat with a torn shoulder seam, chewing nicorettes and blinking palely in the sunlight of the manicured courtyard. Since I last saw her, Margo has worked for the Age, the Canberra Times, when it was briefly under the editorship of Michelle Grattan, (‘The best editor I have ever worked for’, Margo says. ‘She used to say things like “Now Margo, I want you to go out and get pissed and

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write something outrageous”.’) and is now with the Sydney Morning Herald. I ask her what she thinks of the high school story now. ‘I think it was wrong’, she says. ‘It was that story that got me thinking about the whole issue of ethics, and private and public lives. But what they don’t say is that (and she names a very senior editorial executive) was meant to enrol him. He was going to pose as his father, but he was too busy on the day and I got asked at the last minute to do it, and I said “yeah, yeah, yeah”, without even thinking about it much. Just “Good story, good story mate”. You know how it is. But that was the Herald all over. It was just so impulsive. Nobody thought it through. That’s what people don’t understand about how journalists work. How big things even don’t get thought through. That’s the scary thing about it, it just didn’t enter my head, the ethics. It was after that I started my selfanalysis of what I do in journalism. I’ve always taken it pretty close to the line when I have wanted to do something in journalism. All journalists do, but I try to have it clear in my head where the line is.’ Since she came to Canberra, Kingston has broken several stories, and pursued others after they had been dropped. She pursued Ros Kelly over the sports-rorts affair long after the rest of the gallery had dropped off the story. Eventually they were forced to pick it up again. She also broke significant aspects of the story about Graham Richardson and the Marshall Islands affair.6 ‘The gallery went very soft on Richo. You see the perception was that he would survive, so they didn’t go for him. And when he got back on to the front bench, there was hardly a murmur’, she says. Also, she tells me there were those who owed Richardson, or hoped to owe him. He was a skilful and judicious leaker of information. Judiciously indiscreet. The gallery, she says, doesn’t necessarily like a scoop. The Australian’s National Heritage story wouldn’t have been picked up because ‘There would be pressure, because they had it and we didn’t, to talk it down, to say that it wasn’t a good story. And everyone hates the Oz anyway, because they never attribute follow-ups. If we follow up an Oz story we’ll say where it came from, but they never do that when they follow up ours.’

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But Margo likes the gallery. She likes the pack. ‘I think it’s good for journalism. Everyone knows if you’ve made a mistake. Everyone knows if you’ve broken a story. We all watch each other, and police each other to some extent.’ The gallery, for example, largely neglected Pauline Hanson. According to Margo, the ‘media over-kill’ came instead from radio and television. The couple of gallery journalists who gave Hanson a run in the early days were constantly chaffed about it. This self-policing she says, also operated when a Coalition parliamentary secretary was ringing around trying to get the gallery to write the story about Cheryl Kernot’s affair with her former school student. The information was being pushed for weeks, but no gallery member picked it up. ‘The gallery has always been pretty good about private lives.’ Margo is not the only person to tell me the name of the parliamentary secretary who was trying to sell the story, and that the gallery wouldn’t touch it, because of the journalists’ respect for private lives. Instead, the story was first broken by Paul McGeough, a nongallery reporter imported, apparently for the purpose. He wrote a cover story for the Sydney Morning Herald’s weekend supplement Spectrum. It was a ‘soft story’, headlined ‘The Other Side of Saint Cheryl’ and was mostly concerned with political history and Kernot’s alleged ruthlessness.7 But more significantly, the article containted the first publication, without names, of the fact of the affair. And this is where the boundaries blur. This is where, in writing this, I make choices with which the gallery would not agree. Where I fail to respect private lives. Because I am going to tell you that McGeough was once a close friend of Margo Kingston’s—a mentor, of hers in fact, when she first came down south to the ‘big smoke’. When he arrived in Canberra to research the Kernot story he asked Kingston for help. ‘I asked him whether he was going to do the personal stuff on Kernot, which I didn’t think should be published, and he said no, so I helped him’, Kingston says. Kingston told McGeough that it had been Kernot who had rung reporters spreading rumours about a relationship between former Democrat Leader Janet Powell and Sid Spindler. These

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rumours were used by Powell’s enemies to unseat her. McGeough’s published story contained this sentence. ‘Kernot, with all of 18 months’ experience as an MP behind her, was one of those busiest backgrounding reporters on the affair.’ Kingston also put McGeough in touch with her brother, Hamish Alcorn, who was a member of the Queensland Democrat Party’s management committee. McGeough quoted Alcorn in his article. ‘I would never have cooperated if he had told me the truth about what he was doing. I was very pissed off when the article was published, and I told him so’, she says. McGeough has a different recollection of events. Early in 1999 Kingston was talking to him at a social occasion, and told him that she had spoken to me about their disagreement over the Kernot story. McGeough was unimpressed. By this time he had been appointed editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, and was Kingston’s boss. She was in a difficult position. A few days after their conversation, Margo passed on a message to me that McGeough wanted to put his side of the story. By this stage, this book was nearing completion. McGeough was under the impression it was virtually on the presses, although this was not the case, and he was angry that I hadn’t contacted him earlier to get his side of the story. When I rang him he emphasised that he was concerned about his reputation. ‘The story as Margo tells it basically says I betray my sources’, he said. ‘And I don’t do that.’ According to McGeough, he never gave Kingston any undertakings about what would and would not appear in the Kernot story. He told me that when he spoke to Kingston, he had known about the rumours of the affair but hadn’t checked it out. He claimed that when Kingston asked him if he was going to go into the personal story, he told her he wasn’t precluding anything. I asked him how he saw the divide between private and public lives, and how he justified what he had done in ‘The Other Side of Saint Cheryl’. He said he did not want to go into that with me, because I hadn’t done him the justice of contacting him earlier. The day after Paul McGeough’s story on Cheryl Kernot was published, the Sun-Herald produced its own version. The authors

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were Daniel Dasey, Liz Hanson, and Fia Cumming, and they pulled no punches. Under the headline ‘Kernot’s Secret Past’ they named Kernot’s lover, and published a photo of him. McGeough had stopped short of naming names. Later in the week, I am talking to Innes Willox about Margo. He laughs when I tell him that she says the gallery has always been good about the barrier between public and private lives. His boss, Alexander Downer, remembers the day when, hot in pursuit of rumours that his leadership was in question, Margo pursued his family to their holiday home. There was blood in the water. The gallery was after Downer. He couldn’t do anything right. Downer wasn’t there, but, says Willox: ‘She interviewed his children. She basically asked them what it was like to have a dickhead for a father’. Margo never wrote up that interview, though, in a story published the next day, she did describe the Downer children playing on the beach, and quoted his mother describing the Liberal Party as ‘the kamikaze party’ and musing ‘I can’t think why they’d want to go back to Howard’. ‘Alex never forgave Margo, although she did apologise later’, Willox says.8 When I asked Margo about this, she said ‘I didn’t want to do that story’. Her Sydney bosses ordered her down to the holiday house with the idea of getting a picture of Downer relaxing on the beach the day before a crucial speech. ‘You’ll remember his leadership was in deep shit’, she says. ‘All the way down there I was feeling sick about it, and hoping he wouldn’t be there’, she recalls. ‘Because of the intrusion?’ ‘Yes. I didn’t want to do it. But why didn’t I feel able to say no?’ She pauses and reflects. ‘I suppose it was such a big story. I had a gut feeling it was justified in the circumstances. That it was what I should be doing, in journalistic terms I mean. But I never asked the kids anything out of order, and I didn’t quote them. No way did I do anything out of line with the kids. Downer blew me up about it at the airport later, and I did apologise. It was wrong. But I didn’t feel able to say no.’

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O ‘You’ve got different hair’, I say to Fia Cumming when I find her, long-haired and blonde, sitting alone in a small office on a tributary of the main press gallery corridors. I met her more than fifteen years earlier, when I was just out of my cadetship, and following a story about the National Film Archives. She was freelancing at the time, and vastly more experienced than me. I still remember her, stick thin and perky, attending a forum on the issue and jumping from person to person gathering quotes, while I was shy and blundering, and spoke only to those who spoke to me. Thus I made some serious errors of judgment, represented the interests only of the side that cultivated me, and was in the end taken off the story. Now Fia Cumming works on the Sun-Herald, a Sydney Sunday tabloid. She smiles at me. Not surprisingly, she doesn’t remember me. ‘Well I think every woman should be blonde once in her life’, she says. I tell her I am writing about the press gallery as an example of the intersection between private and public lives, and that I want to talk to her. Her smile fixes in place. She agrees to meet me in Aussies for coffee the next day. Like many in the gallery, Cumming had had the story about Cheryl Kernot for a while, but the paper hadn’t wanted to run it. ‘Then the Sydney Morning Herald dressed it up in a soft way, and that was the green light for us.’ Her contribution to the story, she says, was comparatively minor and heavily sub-edited, but she makes no apologies for the whole. ‘I think it was totally legitimate. She is a public figure, and there are real issues there.’ Didn’t she feel, I said, that journalists were public figures too? ‘I don’t feel we are public figures.’ ‘But you make a decision what to publish and what not to publish. Those are powerful decisions.’ ‘Yes, but people don’t recognise me when I walk down the street, I’m glad to say.’ I think about that. True of her, perhaps, but not of others. I argue that more people would have known who Laurie Oakes was than Nick Sherry, until Sherry tried to commit suicide. But Sherry

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got his personal life all over the front page. Cumming retorts: ‘Yes, but I don’t know any dirt on Laurie Oakes’. In September 1998, six months after he wrote ‘The Other Side of Saint Cheryl’ and after a shakeout of the top positions at the Sydney Morning Herald, Paul McGeough was appointed editor of the paper. None of the reports of his appointment mentioned the fact that it was he who first broke the line on the Kernot story.

O Ask gallery members and political minders to describe the stratification of the Canberra press gallery, and they tell you there are three levels. There is only a small amount of disagreement about who belongs on which level. First there are the Young and the Restless— junior reporters who come in, attend whatever events and press conferences they need to attend, churn out their stuff (he says this, she says that)—and go home, or more likely go on to a hectic social life. In the middle are the ‘heavy-hitters’. These are people in their 30s or 40s who hold senior jobs and cover important specialties. Sometimes they head bureaus. The expectation is that they get below the surface, talk to ministers privately, and report what is really going on. At the highest level, and again there is only a small amount of disagreement about who belongs there, are the gallery leaders. These people have the power to lead gallery opinion. The names almost everyone agrees on are Glenn Milne, who works for the Seven Network, and also writes a weekly column in the Australian, Paul Kelly, former Canberra bureau chief and editor-in-chief of the Australian (when he is in town) and Laurie Oakes, although some put him on another level all by himself. Some of the ex-God correspondents, such as Ramsey and Grattan, are on this level. Others have dropped behind, or are no longer part of the gallery. When I was in Canberra, some said that Grattan, then working for the Australian Financial Review, had dropped out of the race because she worked for what they call a ‘boutique’ publication. She would prob-

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ably have pointed out that it is also one of the only newspapers that still grants large slabs of space to long articles on policy. Late in 1998, Grattan made a career change. She was to become a columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald, and was therefore likely to become a leader once again. The gallery can also be led by people who aren’t actually there. The ABC’s 7.30 Report is influential, although its anchor, Kerry O’Brien, works from Sydney. The term ‘ex-God correspondent’ needs to be explained. It comes from Laura Tingle, one of the heaviest of the heavy-hitters, and, as mentioned earlier, wife of Alan Ramsey, who used to be a God, or perhaps still is. When I first arrived in Canberra, Tingle had just resigned from the Age after weeks of tense relations with her Melbourne bosses. Her resignation was the talk of the gallery. People told me, with hushed voices, that Tingle’s copy was changed—interfered with—without her being consulted. ‘What did they expect her to do? You can’t do that to someone like Laura’, one of her rivals said. I rang her and asked for an interview, but she refused. ‘I’m just sick of the gallery at the moment’, she said. ‘I don’t want to talk about it or anything connected with it.’ It isn’t unusual for the heavy-hitters to have awkward relationships with their bosses in the other capitals. Home offices these days rarely think Canberra is as important as it is to those on the second floor of the Senate side. This is also why the ex-Gods, although still a presence in the gallery, are no longer quite so God-like. They can no longer command their papers in the way they once did. Heavy-hitters can also have awkward relationships with each other. The day after being refused an interview by Tingle, I ran into her replacement at the Age, an old colleague of mine, Mike Gordon. Gordon is a man with the hard body and polished face of the very fit. He is a very serious person. I greeted him and made some lighthearted remark about Tingle’s departure, and his face set in solemn lines. It was sad that she had left, he said. He was personally very sad, and thought she had made a mistake. Laura had been told that things would improve. Unfortunately, she didn’t have enough faith to wait. That was a pity. Gordon had faith. Four weeks later, on my second trip to Canberra, Tingle is back

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in the gallery with a new job, based a few metres down the hallway in the Sydney Morning Herald office, and now she is willing to talk. We meet in Aussies. I know Tingle only from her picture byline, in which she looks inappropriately girlish for a heavy hitting reporter—long blonde curls, and a small pointy face. Now, face to face, she looks older, the blonde hair cropped into a wavy bob and her eyes crystalline blue. When I mention Gordon to Tingle, she snorts, and tells a long story about when they were both working at the Australian, jockeying for position under the eye of the then editor-in-chief Paul Kelly. She recalls Kelly used to enjoy playing them off against each other. I ask her how the gallery has changed since she began working there. ‘When I started in journalism, there were the God correspondents. Paul Kelly would ring up (from Canberra) and say “I will be writing tonight”, and sometimes you wouldn’t even know what he was writing about, but space would be made available. “I will be writing tonight”—it was like Moses descending with the tablets.’ Under Paul Kelly’s leadership, the Australian was regarded by print journalists as the best in Australia.9 Kelly was also, briefly, my boss, although I rarely saw him. He was one of the most obviously intelligent people I had ever met. Most of his employees were a bit frightened of him, which I think he enjoyed. Kelly and I had lunch together once after I had had a row with one of his underlings and was thinking of resigning. He listened to my gripes without comment, and then said, ‘Let me say three things. One ... ’ I can’t remember what the three things were, but I do remember his manner of speaking. Kelly was always saying, ‘Let me say three things’, or four things, or whatever. And they were always well thought out and delivered in a bass tone full of significance. I also remember Kelly at some stage during this lunch smiling thinly and describing himself as a power junkie. I can’t remember how that came up. Shortly after Lachlan Murdoch came to take over his father’s Australian operations, Kelly ceased to be editor-in-chief of the Australian. The normal fate of ex-editors is to be given columns with which to grow old. Kelly has done much better than that. His title is now ‘international editor’, which means he can crop up anywhere,

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writing about anything. And people are still a little frightened of him. In the Australian’s Canberra bureau, which was my home while I researched this essay, there is a spare desk where he normally sits. Anyone else visiting the bureau is warned that if they use that desk, they will have to move if Kelly turns up. ‘Let me say three things’, intoned one of the News Limited journalists, seeing me scatter my notes and bags over this sacred space. ‘One, this is a desk. Two, this is my desk. Three, you are sitting at my desk.’ This is the mark of the ex-God correspondent. People tell stories about them. People parody them. The edifice must necessarily be undermined. Michelle Grattan was the Kelly equivalent at the Age—not that she spoke like that. Nevertheless she had influence and sometimes even control over what ran where. And the impact of her presence was similar. If Michelle was around, everyone knew. There were stories about Michelle, imitations of Michelle, complaints about Michelle. Alan Ramsey is described as Canberra’s institutional curmudgeon. Over cappuccino in Aussies, Tingle refers to her husband in two ways. When she talks about their personal life she calls him ‘Alan’. When she is talking about the phenomenon, the public guru, the journalist, she calls him ‘Ramsey’. She believes ‘Ramsey’ is still a gallery leader. ‘Probably because of the way he sees things, his particular point of view.’ But Tingle says the phenomenon of the God correspondent is dead, and she feels ambivalent about their passing. On the one hand, political reporting has changed. People are tired of being told what to think by journalists. On the other hand, there isn’t the same deep engagement with policy issues now that there once was. So what does a heavy-hitter actually do? Before Tingle gets into work in the morning, she will have read or glanced through all the newspapers and listened to the radio news and current events. She arrives at the office at around 10.30 am. Sometimes, on those days when she is writing a feature or a comment piece for the Saturday sections of the newspapers, she will arrive much earlier, at 5 or 6 am, because that is the only time when sustained thought is possible. The piece will be finished by mid-

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morning, and then she can get on with the rest of the day. These days, thanks to modern media management, a frightening amount of verbiage is available to the press gallery. When she worked as a bureau chief, one of Tingle’s first jobs for the day was to look through the transcripts of what the Prime Minister had been saying. There would be five or six transcripts of press conferences and radio interviews, on her desk every morning. ‘The workload just dulls the senses. You have to read them all. He may have said it all before, but what you are looking for is not just something new, but a rhetorical breakthrough, a new way of saying something, that gives you an indication of what is happening under the surface.’ ‘Textual analysis?’ I suggest. This term has been given to me by one of the God correspondents, who believes that working in Canberra these days is a bit like being in Hong Kong in the last days of British rule. You watch China, watch what they say, and analyse it for true meaning. Tingle agrees: ‘Yes that’s it. That’s it exactly. You are analysing the text, reading into it with your knowledge of what’s going on. As well, the political minders might ring you. They might give you a spin, and you think about all that, and out of that comes a point of view’. ‘And how do the shifts happen? How is it that the whole gallery seems to change their mind at once?’ I mention the example of Alexander Downer’s leadership of the Liberal Party—one day, ‘young Turk’; the next, dickhead. Tingle denies that there is much caucusing. In her view it only happens ‘perhaps among the junior journalists, and the radio journalists’. But mostly the agreement comes ‘because we’re all watching the same things, reading the same stuff—there are only so many ways that you can write that World War II started today’. Tingle recalls that at the end of 1997 there was a view in the gallery that Howard was in trouble, and that he might lose the election. Now that view had changed. The gallery saw him as being on the front foot again. ‘And how is that view arrived at? What are the mechanics of that?’ ‘Well, he came back this year very assertive, and Labor were in a bit of a decline after their conference. It’s largely in the tone of the

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rhetoric, the tone of a press conference. He might respond to you “I reject the tone of that question”, you know, very assertively, and of course it’s all fraudulent. You know its being done because someone told him that in qualitative polling people said he wasn’t assertive enough. And then it comes across in Parliament. It’s a “no surrender” sort of style.’ ‘And so the gallery changes its mind?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And that might change the public’s mind? It might be self fulfilling?’ Tingle disagrees. The gallery is not as influential as it likes to think. The gallery is terribly vulnerable to being sold a line the public doesn’t necessarily buy. ‘The gallery loved Keating, and the general community hated him. And that was because right though the 1980s, Keating would have a press conference and just take questions until we’d run out of questions. We’d be there for a couple of hours, and it wasn’t easy, it was adversarial, but after all that you’d come out thinking. “This man is sincere in pursuing the national interest.”’ ‘Now with Howard, he doesn’t do that. You have no confidence that the policy positions are thought through. It is ideological core, topped up with short-term considerations, and you often aren’t confident they know what they are trying to achieve. Howard won’t justify things because he feels he doesn’t have to. But the public sees none of this.’

O Parliament is sitting. It is the end of March. The Wik legislation will shortly fail to pass the Senate for the second time, meaning an election is likely soon. All the politicians and their minders are in town, and although life continues much the same on the second floor of the Senate side of Parliament House, there is a sense of the place being more crowded, of there being more people to talk to, and more to do. Under the noticeboard and around the boxes are cardboard cartons piled with copies of the reports being tabled in Parliament

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that day. Most of them are centimetres thick. Most have to be read or scanned, or since that is impossible, at least the press release folded into the front cover will have to be read, or scanned. The monitors are on along the pink corridors, but people are only half-listening. The proceedings are sleepy, routine. But all that changes at two o’clock. The bells ring. (The bells, the bells.) Question time, the main event, begins in the blue-green chamber of the House of Representatives. I am trying to find the entrance to the press gallery door. The non-public areas of this building are unfriendly to anyone who doesn’t know their way around. And while the two Parliamentary chambers—Senate and House of Representatives—are the twin hearts of the building, they are suspended among the offices and public spaces like the twin yolks of an egg. Easy to find, hard to penetrate. You can walk right around the chambers on all three levels of the building and even glimpse the inside of the chambers through corner windows, without finding a way in. It has to be so for security reasons. Entrances must be limited, with the public strictly divided from the performers. On the first floor in the public area, I see people queuing up to be searched, metal detected and let in. But I don’t want to sit with the public, I want to sit with the journalists. If I walk around the chamber for long enough, I must find the press gallery door, I think. And so I begin, down green-grey corridors. Now question time has begun. I can hear the voices—great, angry, booming male voices, through the corridors. Occasionally I catch a glimpse down into the chamber, and I can see suited bodies lolling on Government and Opposition benches. But most of all there is the noise. Roars and booms, as I walk around trying to find a way in. I give up on the first floor, and go down to the ground. Again, the booming, again the glances through windows, except now I am on the same level as the speakers, and what I can see is the people in the public gallery above looking down—pink poised faces, like characters in a Rembrandt painting. Above them in a special glassed-off area are rows of falling socks and scuffed knees on the legs of the school children, brought to see democracy in action. On this level there are several entrances, but all of them are

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marked ‘Locked door’, ‘No entry’ or ‘Members only’. Up to the second floor then, far above the performers. Here there is more light than anywhere else. The ceiling of the chamber is a great window, and you feel that you are near the surface of things, at the top of the sea, where the sun can be seen and even felt, but the big fish, the life of this aquarium, is far below. Boom boom go the voices in the grey-green chamber. Eventually, back on the first floor, I find the unmarked wooden doors which are the entrance to the press gallery. There are four rows of tiered seats. The heavy-hitters of the gallery sit close to the front. I sit in the back row. The only other person in this row is Paul Kelly, who is only half-listening. He is reading a book by Opposition frontbencher Mark Latham.10 In a column published later in the week, Kelly will describe it as a heavy read, but a genuine attempt to redefine what Labor might stand for in the era of footloose capital, and predatory multi-nationals. Kelly will say Latham ‘puts the issue of contemporary politics squarely: whether politicians will try to live by the tricks of sophisticated electoralism—polls, rhetoric, marginal seat campaigning—devoid of policy answers and offering “nothing more than a chimera of false comfort and expectations”, or whether there will be a return to universal values and ideas’.11 But now Kelly is absorbed in his reading. Occasionally he looks up and smiles with the air of someone who has heard it all before, at the booming of the big fish. At the rhetoric and the tricks. Below us the heads of the press gallery are like coconuts. Each one has a notebook in front of them, and from here it is possible to get a good view of their doodles. They draw circles, and tents, and turreted castles with flags on them. One draws a series of interconnecting staircases. The Treasurer, Peter Costello, is on his feet. He is replying to a Dorothy Dixer question, asked with almost comic weariness by a backbencher: ‘Is the Treasurer aware of …? Will the Treasurer explain the Government’s position on … ?’ ‘I thank the member for her question’, starts Costello … and then into an attack. Boom boom. Hands on hips. Leaning forward over the table. The Opposition assumes attitudes of disdain and mockery. Then the reply. Boom boom. A pointing of the finger. Roars of laughter. There is the occasional titter from the gallery,

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accompanied by a cessation of doodles and the start of note-taking. Costello is attacking Mark Latham, and through him the Labor Party. Latham’s ideas don’t accord with Labor Party policy, you see. Inconsistency is weakness. Inconsistency is bad. I have just got my bearings, just absorbed the topic of the debate, when I hear someone in the gallery say ‘Why is that little girl waving at us?’ I look across to the public galley and see my daughter Clare with her father. She is ignoring the Treasurer. She has seen me, and she is standing up on her seat waving madly. I am worried that the aggression, the shouting down below, will upset her, but clearly it is all too distant, too unreal. A few gallery members wave back at her in a half-hearted embarrassed way. She is thrilled. She falls off her chair in her excitement, but the booming is loud enough so I can’t hear her cry. Question time finishes, and suddenly there is a great exit. All the big fish leave. The press gallery empties. The eddies settle. The booming stops. On the floor of the Parliament a solitary figure stands and reads out petitions. The steady life of the ocean continues and the normal, muffled sounds of the aquarium are piped into the offices on the second floor of the Senate side. A quiet, fishy glup glup of legislation passing, business being done. Glup, glup, glup. No surprises. No stories. Later, Peter Cole-Adams, at the time chief political correspondent for the Canberra Times and a member of the Age diaspora that began with Michelle Grattan’s departure, tells me that question time has been very rowdy lately. The rumour is that Leo McLeay, the Opposition whip, has a pot of money on his desk for the first ALP member who gets expelled by the new Speaker, Ian Sinclair. Sinkers, knowing this, is supposed to be reluctant to expel them. I congratulate Cole-Adams on his account of question time the previous day. ‘Politics is mostly theatre’, he says. ‘I think someone ought to review it.’ Cole-Adams is something of a wise old man of the gallery, and one of the few commentators whose copy can be read for pleasure. ‘There are an awful lot of young reporters around who tend to write things like ‘in an unprecedented move … ’, he observes. ‘What they really mean is ‘I don’t remember anything like this happening

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before, and I have been here nearly three years’. And on another occasion, he muses, ‘Like most human activities, politics is deeply comic’.

2 Telling Four months after my first trip to Canberra, a shortened version of this essay was published in Eureka Street magazine.12 This version included most of what you have just read. A few weeks after it was published, I had lunch with Peter ColeAdams at his daughter Kate’s house. Kate, who like me is living in the Blue Mountains and juggling journalism and motherhood, is one of my best friends. We share the same baby-sitter. The baby-sitter is always telling us we are too stressed. ‘Don’t you ever have a day on which you just do nothing?’, she asked me recently. I laughed. Over lunch, Cole-Adams told me that Margo Kingston had spent the days immediately after my essay was published rushing around the gallery saying to all her ex-bosses ‘Who called me unmanageable? Did you call me unmanageable?’ Cole-Adams eventually admitted: ‘I think I might have said something of the kind, Margo.’ And when she looked at him, shocked, he said she shouldn’t be offended. He thought it was the nicest thing he could possibly say about a journalist—that they were unmanageable, and broke stories. Then towards the end of July, Margo Kingston rang me on my mobile phone. She caught me on the hop, half way between work and getting home in time for the chaotic hour of feeding, bathing and bedding my babies. Margo on the other hand was on holidays and had been using the time to read, first my essay and then, prompted by that, my most recent novel, The Truth Teller, which is more or less about journalism—or at least, about telling stories that are not your own. Margo said it had been a shock to see herself portrayed, and she thought my view of the gallery was a bleak one, but the essay, and my novel, had intensified her ever-present career crisis. ‘I just want to read you some of the “blurb” on your novel. It says your prose “has a blend, all its own, of empathy and ruthlessness”.’ ‘Er. Yes.’

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‘I think you brought those things to the press gallery’, she said. I wasn’t sure whether to thank her, but I told her that I had been commissioned to write this book. She warned me that there were a few people who might not want to talk to me again. ‘Laura Tingle is cross because she thinks you called her husband a has-been. She says you wrote it more like a novel than an article.’ ‘That was kind of the point’, I said. ‘And Stephen Lunn is angry that stuff about him wanting to go on holiday got in.’ The blurb on my novel that Margo Kingston quoted to me— the stuff about empathy and ruthlessness—was written by the novelist Amanda Lohrey, who edited the book, and became a good friend in the process. She made the editing process a pleasure. I was pregnant with Clare at the time, and I used to travel down by train from the Blue Mountains to Amanda’s Newtown terrace. She was tough on my prose and ruthless with my commas, but gentle to my body. She gave me lectures on the differences between naturalism and realism. She made me have little lie-downs on the couch in her front room. She took me out for foccacia, made jugs of lemonade with real lemons and crushed ice, and told me to read the essays of Joan Didion. We talked about journalism, and about novels, and literature. Amanda said to me, one afternoon, that my recent life story was really about the unmaking of a journalist. That made me sad. My relationship with journalism at the time was that of a disillusioned lover, but I didn’t want the relationship to end. On another occasion she suggested that I concentrate on journalism for a while, and put novels aside. Journalism, after all, was better paid. This advice also made me sad. Novels, after all, were respectable in a way that journalism would never be. Some writers I knew used the word ‘journalism’ as an insult. It was Amanda who first suggested that the essay style might suit me. She complained to me that literature in Australia was rarely political. Amanda’s first two novels had been political, and much neglected.13 I complained to her that journalism in Australia was rarely thematic, rarely literary. ‘Don’t be afraid to use that word “I” ’, Amanda told me one afternoon as I reclined on her couch.

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I replied that I had been taught as a journalist never to use ‘I’, or only rarely. It had been drilled into me that the word ‘I’ was self indulgent, pretentious and the sign of an ego out of control. ‘The readers don’t want to know about precious little YOU’, a sub-editor had once roared at me. Amanda snorted. ‘The word “I” is just another rhetorical device’, she said, and urged me to unmake the journalist a little more. It was two years and two babies later before I was able to act on her suggestion, and write this. I sent her a draft of the material that appeared in Eureka Street for comment, and she wrote back that as a feature article it was promising. As an essay it had a way to go because I hadn’t fully tapped the personal passion, the driving visceral force, that underlay the project. This was, she said, my own ambivalence about being a journalist. The love and the hate of it. The excitement and the repulsion. She was bothered by my mentioning my babies all the time. It was natural, she said, to insert your children into anything you were writing. This was because they were the centre of your life and at the heart of all experience. To others, though, it could become an irritating tic. ‘Nevertheless I do think your babies belong in this piece’, she wrote, and urged me to expand the theme ‘You are trying to say “yes, I am a journalist, but no, I am not one of the monkeys in this zoo”,’ and added that she would understand if I didn’t want to say this explicitly. After all, my colleagues would hate me. ‘I think you could say more about the mask of the professional. In general terms you are covering this pretty well but you could give a bit more space—and direct address—to women who might feel they have to try to be hard-nosed men; as if having children was just an add-on and not something that permanently alters your angle of refraction (not that it necessarily diminishes your ruthlessness— where necessary!)’ I thought about this. I had talked to Laura Tingle about babies, and whether it was possible to have them and be at the heart of the second floor of the Senate side of Parliament House. She had said: ‘It is possible to work. There are a few woman who do it. And the men do it. Either they are less apologetic about having to leave early, or they manage to organise their lives so it isn’t them who have to leave.

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You can do it if you can find a particular job, a particular line to follow, a niche. But if you want to be at the centre of things, saying “look at me, look at me” you need a nanny or something. It’s very difficult’. Babies—and not only babies, but human connections of the skin-touch, love-your-eyes, lose-myself-in-your-hands type—are not the sort of things welcomed on public display in the world of Canberra. It is not easy to have them. If you do have them, you must put them aside. Keep them in their place. You see, there isn’t very much time.

O Another thing happened after the Eureka Street article was published. I was invited to speak at a seminar on the Canberra press gallery organised by the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism. It was the first in a series of seminars named after George Munster who had helped edit Nation and later Nation Review. It seemed that on the strength of one piece I had suddenly become that thing hated by working journalists: a media commentator. I would be speaking, I was told at first, on the same stage as Cheryl Kernot and Laura Tingle. Later I was told that Tingle had pulled out because she was in the late stages of pregnancy. She would have been pregnant (although it was not generally known) when I did that interview with her, and when we spoke about motherhood I guess she must have been talking partly about herself, and the choices that lay before her. At first Margo Kingston was planned as a replacement for Tingle, but by the time the seminar rolled around she too had pulled out, because the election campaign had begun and everyone was busy. Kernot had cancelled as well. Phil Cleary, the former independent MP for Bob Hawke’s old seat of Wills, and Dennis Shanahan, bureau chief of the Australian were the other two speakers. Early on the day of the seminar I was sitting in on a morning editorial conference at the Australian where the day’s events are planned. I heard the executives around the table talking about

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Shanahan, and it was all ‘Shanahan will write … ’ and ‘Shanahan will say … ’. How would he do all these things, I wondered, and still make the stage at six o’clock that night? Why was he doing it? The audience was likely to be hostile, and Shanahan was being brave—a Christian before the lions—the only person present expected to defend the Canberra press gallery. I walked out of the rain and into the hall where we were to speak and saw Shanahan, a chunky man with salt and pepper hair, talking urgently on his mobile phone giving last-minute instructions to the news desk. Then we were on stage, and the press gallery copped a blast from Cleary. Then Shanahan spoke, then me. Much of the next hour was taken up by Shanahan fielding insults and questions from the audience. Asked what the gallery was doing to reach out to real people, he pointed out that he was there, on stage, talking to them. He said he thought it was important that journalists did such things. I don’t know that many in the audience appreciated just how significant that was—for a heavy-hitter to give them time in the middle of an election campaign. They applauded his words, but perhaps did not give him sufficient credit. I mentioned, during the discussion, that the only response from the gallery that I had had to my Eureka Street piece had been thirdhand, and that one person had apparently said that it read more like a novel than an article. Later, Shanahan took me aside and said that the gallery’s objection to my piece had not been that the style was like a novel, but that some of my techniques had not been ‘in accord with ethical journalistic practice’. I asked him what he meant, and he said he objected to my use of eavesdropped remarks heard during my time in the bureau, and went on ‘You reported an eavesdropped remark of mine’. ‘Yes. One.’ ‘But a telling one.’ ‘Yes.’ I argued that this was in accord with normal journalistic practice, ethical or otherwise. What about those profiles of prominent people, published in colour magazines and all those Saturday supplements with names like Spectrum and Focus and other words to do with the bending of light? Journalists would follow a Pauline Hanson or a Tim Fischer around for a day or a week, and it was common

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practice in such pieces for the off-the-cuff remarks of staff and family and friends to end up as part of the article. Whether it was ethical or not, it happened. It was frequent journalistic practice. Shanahan said the difference was that people knew there was a journalist present. They knew what was being done. He said nobody in the bureau at the Australian had known that they were likely to be quoted. ‘But you knew I was there. In the bureau. You knew what I was doing’, I said. I had written a letter to the editor-in-chief, David Armstrong, outlining my project. I had been told the letter had been passed on to Shanahan. Shanahan replied: ‘I was just told to organise you a pass’. Shanahan, after all, is a heavy-hitter. Not a God. The eavesdropped remark of Shanahan’s that he was referring to appeared in the Eureka Street article, but has been changed in this book. In the Eureka Street piece, the following paragraph appeared in the description of events on the morning of Stephen Lunn’s scoop about the National Heritage Trust, which now appears on page 9. In the Australian office, the bureau chief is having trouble persuading the author of the scoop, Stephen Lunn, to come in to work. Lunn is meant to start holidays today before being transferred to the Melbourne office. He wasn’t planning to come in. The bureau chief exerts some pressure. ‘The editor, quite legitimately in my view, was expecting you to come in and do the follow up.’ Lunn comes in.

There are, of course, other eavesdropped conversations in that Eureka Street essay, and in this book, for example, Lunn’s conversation with the Government media minder in which he jokes about Senator Hill, and the caucusing and gossip of the reporters making their way to Howard’s press conference. Later there is an account of a telephone conversation involving a member of John Howard’s staff, and another conversation overheard in the women’s toilets. Is this unethical? The unmaking of a journalist? There are two relevant clauses of the current journalists’ code of ethics—one saying journalists must use only fair and honest means to obtain material, and another requiring them to identify

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themselves and their employer before obtaining any interview for publication. The code is otherwise silent on the right to privacy, except in the context of those who have been bereaved. However, over the last few years a committee has reviewed the code and in its report recommended a new clause requiring journalists to: ‘Accept the right to privacy of every person’, but adding that ‘public figures’ privacy may be reduced by their public role’. In its report, the review committee quoted the Australian Law Reform Commission’s view that publication of private facts could be justified if they concerned a person’s professional activities, how they made decisions on public matters, or when they related to services offered to the public.14 This new code hasn’t been adopted yet, and a working party has subsequently altered key aspects of it, but it is probably fair to regard the report of the review committee as the clearest recent expression of what journalistic ethics might be. One of the big recommended changes is a new preamble to the code to encapsulate the highest aspirations of journalism. The revised code as a whole lays a new emphasis on conscientious decision making, rather than a ‘letter of the law’ approach. This is the Journalists Code of Ethics recommended by the review committee. Journalists describe society to itself. They seek truth. They convey information, ideas and opinions, a privileged role. They search, disclose, record, question, entertain, suggest and remember. They inform citizens and animate democracy. They give a practical form to freedom of expression. Many journalists work in private enterprise, but all have these public responsibilities. They scrutinise power, but also exercise it, and should be accountable. Accountability engenders trust. Without trust, journalists do not fulfil their public responsibilities. MEAA members engaged in journalism commit themselves to: • honesty • fairness • independence • respect for the rights of others.

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In consultation with colleagues, they will apply the following standards: 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Report and interpret honestly, striving for accuracy, fairness and disclosure of all essential facts. Do not suppress relevant available facts, nor give distorting emphasis. Make efforts to give the subject of any damaging report an opportunity to comment, preferably in that same report. Urge the fair correction of errors. Use fair and honest means to obtain material. Avoid misrepresentation and use of concealed equipment or surveillance devices. Pictures and sound should be true and accurate. Any manipulation likely to mislead should be disclosed. Plagiarism is stealing. Always attribute fairly. Only quote directly what is actually said or written. Otherwise paraphrase. Meaning and context should be accurately reflected. Disclose any direct or indirect payment made for interviews, pictures or information. Do not allow personal beliefs or commitments to undermine accuracy, fairness and independence. Where relevant, disclose. Do not allow any payment, gift or other advantage to undermine accuracy, fairness and independence. Where relevant, disclose. Do not improperly use a journalistic position for personal gain. Guard against advertising or commercial considerations improperly influencing journalism. Where it occurs, disclose. At times of grief or trauma, always act with sensitivity and discretion. Never harass. Never exploit a person’s vulnerability or ignorance of media practice. Interview only with informed consent. Do not place unnecessary emphasis on personal characteristics including race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, age, sexual orientation, family relationships, religious belief or physical or mental disability. Never knowingly endanger the life or safety of a person without informed consent. Exercise particular care for the welfare of children in reports involving them. Respect every person’s right to a fair trial. Aim to attribute as precisely as possible all information to its source. When a source seeks anonymity, do not agree without first considering the source’s motive and any alternative attributable sources. Keep confidences given in good faith. Educate yourself about ethics and help to enforce this code.

Guidance clause Basic values often need interpretation and sometimes can come into conflict. Ethics requires conscientious decision-making in context. Only substantial considerations of public interest or substantial harm to people allows any standard to be overridden.15

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I suppose if any of the journalists I have written about complain about me under the code of ethics (and I am a member of the Journalists section of the Media, Arts and Entertainment Alliance, and therefore bound by its code) I will argue that journalists are public figures and so have a reduced right to privacy. And I could point to the preamble of the code, and argue that this essay is in accord with those aspirations. I could also ask (although this would probably be deemed irrelevant) whether the subjects of the essay always obey Clause One, about disclosing all facts, or whether sometimes the requirements of the job, the Chinese walls and the rules they have to live by, make that difficult. Who knows whether I would, could or should succeed with my defence? I can’t pretend to be sure I am right. My accusers would surely say that they should at least be entitled to privacy in their own offices, and you can see their point. I have not quoted remarks to do with home life, or love affairs, or much of the whispered viciousness in the corridors and canteen. The press gallery, like most professional groups, can be poisonous internally and unified only in response to outsiders. One press gallery journalist with whom I argued about the rights and wrongs of what I had done, and what I planned to do, snorted at the idea that he and his colleagues were public figures. ‘If I was a commentator I would be a public figure, but an ordinary reporter is not.’ And yet this reporter has broken significant stories, and is rightly proud of them. He agreed that the gallery was reluctant to follow up scoops. ‘It is almost a reverse onus of proof. If you have broken a story you have to prove it is good before anyone will pay it attention.’ When I told him I would like to quote him by name saying this, he responded: ‘I’ll think about it, but as I’m sure you know, it can be better to keep your head down, and not to rock the boat.’ There he and I part ways. Part of me fears the censure of colleagues. Part of me wants to be a good girl. Part of me wants to be liked. Part of me thinks ‘to hell with it’. Part of me is cross with them for being so precious.

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O It was clear to me right away that I might want to publish the conversation I had with Dennis Shanahan after the seminar at which we both spoke. I left the hall on Sydney’s Broadway and raced down the underpass to Central Station to catch my train, repeating the words to myself all the way, and justifying myself in my head, as one does when under attack. As soon as I was on the train I noted down what I could remember. As the train climbed through the rain back towards my mountain home I relaxed a little, then realised that I had a problem. The conversation was hardly eavesdropped, but Shanahan had no idea that he was likely to be quoted. So some weeks later I faxed him a draft of what I thought was said, and asked his permission to use it. The version I faxed to him read like this: Later, Shanahan took me aside and said that the gallery’s objection to my piece had not been that the style was like a novel, but that some of my techniques had not been ‘in accord with ethical journalistic practice’. I asked him what he meant, and he said that I had used off-the-record comments. ‘No I didn’t. All the interviews I did were on the record. They knew what I was doing.’ ‘Not the interviews. It is more the eavesdropped comments’, he said, and went on to mention his telephone conversation with Stephen Lunn about his holidays on the morning the National Heritage Trust story was broken. ‘You reported an eavesdropped remark of mine.’ ‘Yes. One.’ ‘But a telling one.’ ‘Yes.’

That was part of what I faxed to Shanahan. He wrote back: Meg, I hope you don’t mind if I reply briefly, we are working on our own book at the moment—between the news and those other light bending sections—so time is short.

He wanted to emphasise that he thought the reporting of the contents of eavesdropped conversations completely unethical. It was this, rather than ‘off-the-record’ conventions, that had most bothered

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him. He went on: There is a factual error in the sentence referring to the telephone conversation with Stephen Lunn. I don’t know if you relied on your previous notes for this reference but I didn’t ever talk to Stephen on the morning the Trust story broke. You may have reported that previously but it is wrong. Again one of the difficulties of eavesdropped reporting is that you don’t hear the other side of the conversation on the telephone. The conversation you reported me having was with someone else in the office about two different telephone conversations.

Shanahan also said: What you leave out is up to you but I did make the point that I had been asked to organise a pass and a desk for you as one of our columnists who was researching for a book. This conflicts with your published claim but again that is a matter for you. I also made the point that the only people you quoted by name or title from the Australian had not been told you were quoting them for publication at any stage, let alone in an early journalistic piece on the operations of our office. The editing out of those remarks is a matter for you as the author.

I wrote back to tell him I would change the account of our conversation after the seminar to accord with his recollections and to make it clearer that he objected to the fact that nobody in the bureau had known they were going to be quoted. Responding to his claim that I had not been completely honest about the way I gained access to the gallery, I sent him a copy of the letter I had faxed to David Armstrong, editor-in-chief of the Australian asking for access and laying out the nature of the project. I also wrote: Regarding the factual error you say I have made regarding the telephone call with Stephen Lunn. I must admit this has confused me, since my recollection on it is quite clear. However, of course you know whom you spoke to and whom you did not speak to. I will change the relevant section in the book. However, can you explain to me how I might have made this confusion? My memory and notes are in accord with what was published in ‘Eureka Street’. I also recall another reporter talking to me about your telephone conversation. They were also under the impression you had been talking to Lunn.

Shanahan replied: On the question of facts, your report of my conversation with Stephen Lunn is wrong. You and anybody else who overheard a number of conversations could eas-

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ily have been mistaken. I spoke to the Sydney office about the follow-up story, not Stephen. Someone else in the Canberra office had called Stephen and suggested he come in, even though on holidays, to do the follow-up. Stephen agreed, without hesitation and appeared in the office without any prompting from me whatsoever. If you had asked either Stephen or me or the other person who spoke to him we could have confirmed that and avoided the suggestion Stephen was unwilling to follow his own story. I am always ready to debate my position or decisions openly and have put up with various incorrect reports in the past. Stephen was the one who suffered most from the error in your ‘Eureka Street’ piece. …

He went on to say that one of the errors I had made was in referring, in the draft I faxed to him, to David Armstrong as the ‘managing editor’, rather than the editor-in-chief. They are two different people. But his objection was broader than this. He thought I had mis-stated an important point: how I got access to the press gallery in the first place. The other point I refer to is your suggestion that although an unofficial outsider you still had enough friends, former colleagues and contacts to secure a Parliamentary pass and a desk. While your description is colourful, literary and entertaining, the prosaic situation was that as bureau chief I had a request from the Editor in Chief’s secretary to organise a pass and a desk for one of our columnists who was writing a book. I duly did so. You are of course in a better position than me to know if David is a former friend, colleague or contact to be so described.

Later he said: I am a firm believer in encouraging more adventurous writing in Australian journalism. But, if it is journalism, it cannot be allowed the latitude of fiction. Several recent works I have read have straddled the two with mixed results.

I replied: Thank you for clearing up the confusion over the phone calls and Stephen Lunn. If I re-use any of that material, I will make appropriate changes. … I do hope that Stephen also recognises that the main message behind what I wrote about his work was that he broke an important story, and that the rest of the gallery was tardy in not following it up, and their motives suspect. That was certainly the main point I was trying to get across. Nevertheless, clearly I have made an error about who telephoned whom. I will,

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if you and Stephen think it appropriate, attempt to have ‘Eureka Street’ publish a correction, but I have been trying to draft one tonight, and can’t find any way of doing it that doesn’t sound precious and make the problem worse. Something like ‘it was not in fact the bureau chief who made the telephone call, and no pressure had to be exerted to encourage Lunn to come into work’ seems to me to simply revive the issue, and also to detract from the main point of what I wrote about his story, which is, as I say, favourable to Stephen. Nevertheless, if you and Stephen would like a correction published, I will endeavour to achieve this. Should I talk to Stephen myself about this, or are you handling the matter on his behalf? In terms of David Armstrong, I would claim him as a contact and former colleague. I could not, I think, claim him as a friend. When I wrote to him I had no idea whether he would consent to my request or not. I would not have been surprised if he had refused. Certainly I made no reference to my column in our correspondence. I didn’t see it as relevant. I had various other options lined up in case of his refusal, and these did involve other friends, contacts and former colleagues. I think my description of my position as an semi-outsider-with-contacts, and my planned use of these contacts to get a desk and a pass is a fair summary of the actual position I was in, and what I did and planned to do. I do accept, however that you were not as fully informed as I thought you had been about what I was doing. I don’t know whose idea it was to describe me to you as ‘one of our columnists’. It certainly wasn’t mine. I agree with you entirely about the necessity for journalism, no matter how adventurous, to stay within the facts, or at least to be as clear as possible about what is fact, what conjecture and what opinion and supposition. If there are errors of fact in my piece (and God knows I am fallible) then that is what they are: errors, not literary devices. I will not be seeking to defend any such errors on the basis of literary licence. However this sort of work does allow for personal perspective, opinion, conjecture, imaginings and so on to find their way into the texture of the piece. As my editor (book editor that is) Amanda Lohrey puts it ‘you foreground your own subjectivity, as well as that of some of the press gallery’. But the reader should be clear what they are reading.

And finally, I asked him if I might quote from our correspondence in this book. He wrote back briefly giving me permission, saying he thought it was too late for a correction. He also suggested I ring Stephen Lunn to tell him what had passed between us. I did this. Lunn spoke to me mainly about his concern over the publication of the eavesdropped remark about Senator Hill. He seemed more concerned about this than about his truncated holidays. We argued about ethics, and he said he would talk to Shanahan and consider writing a statement about the whole matter for me to use if I wished. At the time of writing, in late March 1999, I have heard no more.

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And for the sake of fairness, on re-reading my journal for the period I find I cannot be sure who it was who told me the letter I had written to Armstrong had been passed on to Shanahan. It was simply whoever answered the phone in Armstrong’s office. My journal entry for the relevant week reads in part: Armstrong has written giving go ahead for Canberra project. Amazing! Rang to thank. Not there. Letter passed on to Shanahan and I must ring him. Nervous. Wonder how he feels about it? Not best pleased, I guess. Trying to organise Feb/March/April … Will baby be old enough to travel? … ’

And I went on to agonise about the things working mothers agonise over. Another thing. The column I write which Shanahan refers to is a gardening column with the slightly embarrassing title Earthmother. It appears weekly in the Review section of the Australian. I write about growing things, and about children and nappies and seeds and compost and my chooks. I have no doubt that many of the journalists of the Canberra press gallery dislike the Earthmother column if they read it, which they probably do not. I have only recently got out of the habit of apologising for it myself. So now you know the whole story, or most of the story. Or at least, how the published story was written and re-written, and the shades of subjectivity and emphasis, disagreement, error and negotiation that can lie between an event and the published report. Normally this process is internal, carried on in the journalist’s head—what to leave in, what to leave out, where to put the emphasis and what is fair. But always, there is that process, whether or not it is conscious, whether or not it is acknowledged. Perhaps you also have some sense of just how annoyed the Canberra press gallery can be by scrutiny from outsiders, and how ethical rules can be worried at and turned this way and that to suit whoever is arguing. To be accused of breaching ethics is a traumatic thing for anyone who wants to be considered a good journalist. And yet trying something different, at least in Canberra, is almost bound to breach at least some people’s understanding of the rules, because the reporting there is so tied up in agreements and trust, and understandings of what can be published, and what cannot.

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While writing this book I heard about a business journalist who has taken to buying small numbers of shares in major companies so that he can go along to the annual general meetings. Once there, in his dual role of shareholder and journalist, he asks difficult questions, and reports the results. Of course, he could be accused of conflict of interest. I am sure he has been. But the fact is, he has found a different way of doing things. Good journalism has resulted. But leaving aside the ethical questions, simple reporting easily comes unstitched. Are you any closer to what actually happened that day in the Australian office? Can you be certain about what was said by Shanahan, and myself, after the seminar? This is the distance reporting creates. This is how difficult sticking to the facts can be. Although an error is an error, it is wrong and dangerous to pretend that reporting is a simple thing to do.

O Back to Parliament House, and what gets told, and what doesn’t get told, from the second floor of the Senate side. The agreements are not always explicit. They are part of the code, part of the understanding between people who work together. People remember only when the agreements are stretched, or broken. Only when the agreements are broken does the public get to see that they existed in the first place. In 1995 Senator Noel Crichton-Browne threatened reporter Colleen Egan of the Australian that he would ‘screw her tits off ’ if she reported how he had voted in a state conference ballot. When Egan replied that she was just doing her job, he responded: ‘Would you like to have sex with me tonight? Write that down.’ Egan did not at first report the remarks, in spite of being urged to do so by others present. It was Margo Kingston, as ever unmanageable, who first wrote about the threat in the Sydney Morning Herald. Her article helped trigger Crichton-Browne’s downfall.16 Kingston tells me that at the time she broke the story, a colleague argued with her that the remarks should be regarded as ‘off the record’. Kingston felt it was outrageous that Egan herself was not at that stage planning to report them.

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Egan wrote about the conversation the day after Kingston. She said in her article that had the remark been made by anyone else, it ‘probably would have remained press gallery gossip’. She said that in spite of being urged by Liberal Party women to report the remarks to show ‘what the most powerful man in the (State) Liberal Party is like’, she had decided not to report the exchange. ‘It was part of the rough and tumble of political reporting, and in fairness to the senator he later told me he believed I was joking when I took down the quotes.’ And then there was the time in 1990, when the gallery was in a fever of excitement about the tension between Hawke and Keating over the Labor leadership. Keating gave a speech at the annual press gallery dinner—an ‘off-the-record’ occasion during which he outlined his claims to the leadership. He said that Australia had never had a real leader. ‘Leadership is not about being popular, it is about being right.’ Australia was ‘teetering on the brink’ of becoming a great nation, but it needed a leader who could communicate a vision. He called himself the ‘Placido Domingo of Australian politics’.17 The whole speech was an appeal to the gallery to support Keating against Hawke. It was reported briefly in the Sunday newspapers. The decision to report the speech was not without agonising. Some who had been at the dinner regarded themselves as bound by an off-the-record agreement, and they refused to report it until others, who had heard about the speech only second-hand, had done so. The speech, once made public, escalated the feud between Hawke and Keating and brought the leadership struggle towards its end game. Quite possibly, political history would have been different had this off-the-record speech never been reported. All this, of course, is more important than Stephen Lunn’s holidays, though perhaps not that much more important than his conversations with ministerial minders or what reporters say to each other on the way to and from press conferences called with the ringing of bells, to announce the departure of Australians for war. On and off the record, and what those words mean, and when the agreements are kept, and when they are broken, and who you can

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trust and how far, have always been at the heart of the understandings that operate in journalism. And on the second floor of the Senate side of Parliament House, the code, the mutual unspoken agreements about what is and is not done, prevail. Most of the time ‘Do you mind if I put rather a lot of myself into it ?’ I asked my publisher when we were discussing this book. He said that was one of the things he had liked about the Eureka Street essay. When I told him that all my training revolted against it, he said that he thought it was more honest, sometimes, to admit one’s own position when reporting than to pretend to be the all-seeing, unfettered eye. Precious little me. I can hear that sub-editor’s derision. I can hear the derision of my colleagues. Not all of me is sure that they aren’t right.

O A political staff member told me about the crush he had had on a press gallery journalist. She agreed to go on a couple of dates with him, but he was never sure whether she was interested in him, or only in the information to which he had access. One night they went to Manuka. He was talking to her. What he was saying, I don’t know. It might have been sweet nothings. It might have been his opinion on that day’s question time. Either way, she shooshed him. Sitting at the next table were senior staff from John Hewson’s office, and they were talking about the GST. She was trying to listen in. ‘Perhaps it is a reflection on me, on how boring I am’, the political staffer said to me modestly. But of course he was wrong. I asked reporters in Canberra how they keep their personal and their public lives separate. Laura Tingle talked about how she and Alan didn’t go out very much, to Manuka or elsewhere. ‘We like to pull up the drawbridge when we get home’, she said. Margo Kingston talked about the barriers involved in personal relationships. ‘In Canberra you have to have a level of Chinese walls all the time, because it’s how this town works. It’s a town focused on politics. How do you meet the people

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you fall for? Through work, and the people you see at work are the staffers and the bureaucrats and the politicians.’ Others didn’t understand the question. They looked confused for a moment, then like a politician who has had media training, answered a question I hadn’t asked. Yes, they said. Developing personal relationships was very important to getting stories. ‘Contacts are everything. You live or die by your contacts’, said one. I discussed with one of the former God correspondents the material I had gathered on Kernot, Cumming, McGeough and Kingston, and whether any of it was news that should be reported. The God replied by talking about personality and whether or not it was relevant to politics. ‘Hawke when he became Prime Minister, quit drinking. He maintained a rigid exercise and diet routine all the time he was Prime Minister. He was a very conscientious Prime Minister. Was it in any business of the public’s what he was doing sexually? I don’t think so. The fact that Cheryl Kernot’s past is news now is a big change in the way things are done here.’ Personality, said the former God, was important to politics because it determined values, and values determined outcomes. But the reason Cheryl Kernot’s past was news was because she is not only a politician. She is a celebrity, and if you are a celebrity, by definition everything about you is relevant. Everything about you is newsworthy. ‘The weak excuse journalists have for all that stuff about Kernot is that she is an alternative leader, and therefore we should know everything about her. But if we are going to go into people’s private lives, why not report on Kim Beazley’s marriage break up, and search it for clues to why he is so weak now? After all, he is the actual alternative leader’, the ex-God said. ‘The answer is because he isn’t a celebrity, and Cheryl Kernot is, and the gallery is obsessed with personality politics.’ All this, the ex-God said, is part of bigger trends—the blurring of information with entertainment, and a perception by the editorcum-managers who are in charge of the newsrooms, and on the blunt end of the remorseless drives for bigger newspaper profits, that people really aren’t interested in politics any more. On the second floor of the Senate side of Parliament House, the personal knocks up against the professional all the time. After all, this

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is just an office. It is also a place where people live, eat and even sleep. It is a place where everyone is ambitious, and everyone is careeroriented. It is a place that exists precisely to bring journalists into intimate contact with politicians. It is a place where if you refuse to blend the lines between the personal and the professional, then your effectiveness is reduced. Babies, of course, don’t fit into this at all.

O I arrange to have coffee with Gary Highland, once press secretary to the then Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Robert Tickner, and now working in a private public relations consultancy. I know he is a different sort of political minder—not a Tony O’Leary—when he asks me the direction in which I will be coming to meet him, and gives me complete directions on how to find his office, which is tucked away in the sidestreets of inner suburban Melbourne. He seems genuinely worried that I might get lost. I don’t. We go out for coffee, to a place he recommends, which is shut. He is embarrassed. Gary Highland is clearly a very obliging man. He began his political career in Townsville working for Senator Margaret Reynolds in the months leading up to the 1993 election campaign, before moving to Canberra to work for Tickner in the last days of the Keating Government. He landed in the middle of the row over Hindmarsh Island He had never worked as a journalist, and was excruciatingly aware of his inexperience. He played cautiously. He deliberately refused to blur the boundaries between the personal and political. He never felt able, as some do, to casually walk the corridors on the second floor of the Senate side of Parliament House, joking with journalists and swapping confidences. On many nights he would lie awake waiting with dread in anticipation of the thud on the verandah that would signal the delivery of that day’s papers. Sometimes he would get up at three in the morning and drive the streets of Canberra, searching for a service station that had an early delivery.

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There were times—like at the height of the Hindmarsh Island controversy—when the sheer volume of media calls made his job impossible to do in the way he would have wished. Every outlet in the country wanted to talk, and they wanted to talk straight away. For 24 hours, he was hardly off the telephone. Then, just as suddenly, the phones stopped ringing. The world had moved on. Tickner was yesterday’s news. Dealing with the press gallery made him nervous. While he was still working for Reynolds he was sent up to the second floor of the Senate side of Parliament House to give an off-the-record briefing to Glenn Milne on the technicalities of native title legislation. ‘I didn’t know how to communicate with journalists’, Highfield tells me. ‘What do you mean?’ He hesitates, squinting into the weak Melbourne sunshine, trying to remember that encounter. Partly, he says, it was an assumption on his part that someone like Milne, a leader in his field, the sort of person that Highfield, a political junkie since his teens, had been watching and listening to and reading for years, would know more about the field. ‘I guess I assumed his grasp would be quite sophisticated. But of course he is a generalist. He covers everything.’ And partly it was the difficulty of understanding about what was on and what was off the record. What do the words actually mean? To be quoted as an ‘insider’ or ‘a source close the minister’ could be as bad as being quoted by name. It was all brinkmanship. All political minders played the game of brinkmanship. The successful media manager gave information that was controversial enough to interest the media, without being so controversial that it created scandal, political mayhem, or made either the minders or their bosses look stupid. And not so controversial that the journalists were tempted to push the ethical boundaries, to push the understanding of what ‘off the record’ meant. Highland says that much of what the gallery reported as political stuff-ups came down to this game of brinkmanship gone wrong, and this was one of the problems with political reporting. ‘Too often, it comes down to writing about who has stuffed up, who has put a foot wrong, rather than what the issues are.’ This wasn’t necessarily the press gallery’s fault, he says. It was the age of

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television reporting, when a politician must sell the message in a 10 or 15-second grab. ‘Whose fault is that?’ Highland asks. ‘It’s not just the journalists. The politicians learn to answer questions in sound bites. It’s a bit like the arms race—a mutual escalation of terror, and everyone is frightened to try something different.’ ‘Journalists role play. They try to convince you that they share your world view. One ABC journalist had me convinced that he shared my general left-of-ALP view of the world. I found out later he was member of the Liberal Party.’ Others bullied him. ‘A woman rang me up once after details of what had happened in Cabinet, and I said I couldn’t tell her, and she said “Oh great. Just great. So every cabinet minister except you can tell me something and you can’t tell me anything”.’ She continued with general reflections on Highland’s competence and judgment. ‘Yet after the election she rang me and said she was sorry to see me go and that I had always been straight with her. So what was going on? A lot of the time I had trouble knowing what was really happening in any particular communication.’ At times, he couldn’t get media coverage no matter how hard he tried. Or else, when there was blood in the water, he couldn’t stop the feeding frenzy. ‘That is when the caucusing of the gallery really happens. If a minister is in trouble, everyone wants to be seen to deliver the knock-out blow.’ It happened to Alexander Downer, and it also happened to Robert Tickner. There was a period when any death of an Aboriginal person in custody led to journalists asking Tickner whether he would resign. ‘The issue wasn’t properly explored’, explains Highland. ‘There are reasons why Aboriginal people tragically continue to die in custody. Many of them relate to the unwillingness of State Governments to properly implement the Royal Commission recommendations. But there’s no room for that kind of analysis when politics is treated as if it should belong on the sports pages.’ Deaths in custody continue, but nobody suggests that the present Minister, John Herron, is to blame. His blood is not in the water. The experience in Canberra changed Gary Highland—made him cannier about how perceptions work. ‘If I had that job again now, I would be able to do it better’, he says.

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I tell him that the members of the gallery have told me that they have always been good at respecting the boundary between the personal the private. We discuss whether this is admirable restraint, or dubious collusion, and agree that it is probably both. ‘It’s not just an ethical thing’, Highland remarks. ‘It’s an agreement of mutual protection to some extent. If scrutiny was being applied to people’s private lives, then that might extend to journalists. And of course, in that place, everyone knows everything.’ Recently Highland helped out the Labor Party in the Queensland election campaign. He remembers one day on the election trail when Peter Beattie talked to reporters about a job creation program, Beattie said, among other things, ‘This isn’t about painting rocks. This is about real jobs’. Later, Highland overheard reporters caucusing. One said to another: ‘This rock painting thing. Is that about Aboriginal art or something?’ The other reporter replied, ‘No he means not like Gough Whitlam jobs, that lead nowhere’. And Highland, his Canberra experience behind him, was able to interrupt and say: ‘No, he means not like Work-For-the-Dole. Not like Howard’s jobs scheme’. And the reporter’s face lit up. Now he understood.

O I am sitting on the toilet on the second floor of the Senate side of Parliament House. The toilet paper here is soft and plentiful. The soap dispensers over the sinks are always well charged, and everything is very clean. I am expecting to meet my partner with baby Lachlan at the Senate side door in quarter of an hour, give the baby a feed, and then go to Aussies to meet Cath McGrath. In the meantime, I am listening to two women talking by the handbasins. ‘How far along are you now?’ ‘Oh about four months.’ ‘So you’re over the sick stage.’

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‘Yep, it wasn’t too bad this time.’ ‘And are you taking time off?’ ‘Three months.’ ‘Is it difficult? Keeping up?’ ‘Oh, it gets that way. I remember last time. It was the election campaign, you know, and we were on the road. We were standing in the street and Howard came out, and everyone said ‘Quick, there he is, run’, and the camera crew just took off, and I was left there, and eventually someone said—oh, can we carry your briefcase, and then I was able to waddle after them.’ I flush the toilet and come out. The women smile at me. The pregnant reporter is wearing a jersey dress that hides her condition well, and a jacket with padded shoulders. Twenty minutes later, I am sitting in the reception area of the Senate side door, breastfeeding my baby. From the looks I am getting, it is a fair guess that this isn’t done here very often. Clare is outside with her father investigating a fountain. Cath McGrath rushes by with a camera crew. She catches sight of me. ‘Is this yours!’ she says, seeing the baby. She is delighted. When we last met, in Queensland, neither of us had children. Now she has a four-year-old. She admires Lachlan, but has to rush. She also has to cancel our lunch appointment. A presser has been brought forward at short notice. McGrath and I meet for lunch the next day. She tells me how she and her husband juggle child care for their daughter. Thanks to his flexibility, it is only now, when she is four, that she is putting in long hours at day care. Cath’s husband understands the pressures of working in the mainstream of journalism. ‘He doesn’t get cross. He just tells me to plan properly’, she says. ‘“Just plan for it Cath. Just plan for it.” That’s what he always says when something goes wrong.’ He has used this phrase less often since the time when she rang him on her mobile phone to tell him that she wouldn’t be able to get to that two-year-old’s birthday party in Singapore. ‘I just wish you’d plan … ’ he began. Then she told him she was in jail. McGrath kept filing stories, using her mobile telephone. She did this even after they had told her to stop, until they took away her

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telephone. She tells me the whole story, and it excites me. She did so well. She was so brave. It makes me want to enter the fray again. To be a journalist. To do what McGrath did: the great ongoing struggle, against time lines, against the injunctions of the powerful, and with no time to think or reflect, to let people know what is going on. Working in Canberra, McGrath says, is different. Everyone finds their own way of operating and their own level of access to the people who make decisions. ‘You do have to be careful. If you are too outspoken, you lose access’, she says. ‘You can be critical, but you must keep a straight bat.’ What does that mean exactly? She struggles to explain, but later shows me a transcript of her broadcast the day after the Gulf War press conference. The ABC was unusual in that it broadcast some dissenting opinion about Australia’s contribution to the imminent war. This is the sort of thing that leads the Howard Government to complain of ABC bias. McGrath had to be careful. This is the transcript of McGrath’s report. The bits in bold were not spoken. They are the notes, the stage directions of you like, for how the report is put together. TAKE OFF—AND AUSTRALIA’S GULF MISSION BEGINS SOUND UP 707 EARLIER IT WAS TIME FOR FINAL PREPARATIONS TAKE GRAB MCLACHLAN PERTH ‘THEY’RE ALL VERY KEEN TO GO, ALMOST CHAMPING AT THE BIT YOU MIGHT SAY.’ AT THE HEADQUARTERS OF THE CRACK S-A-S REGIMENT, FAREWELLS, GOOD WISHES – AS THE PRIME MINISTER LEFT CANBERRA FOR THE WEST COAST TO SEE THEM OFF. TAKE GRAB HOWARD ‘I KNOW THAT THEY WILL GO WITH THE GOOD WILL THE PRAYERS AND HOPES OF ALL AUSTRALIANS.’ TAKE GRAB BEAZLEY ‘I DO FEEL FOR THE FAMILIES IN PARTICULAR OF THESE SOLDIERS.’ BUT THERE IS SOME DISSENT. TAKE GRAB ALBANESE SYDNEY

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‘I WOULD SAY TO THE HOWARD GOVERNMENT THAT THIS IS A MISTAKE THAT WE NEED TO CONSIDER THE OPTIONS VERY CAREFULLY.’ TAKE GRAB MEG LEES ADELAIDE ‘WE ARE FOLLOWING THE UNITED STATES TO ATTEMPT WITH FORCE TO IMPLEMENT UNITED NATIONS SANCTIONS WHEN THE UNITED NATIONS DOESN’T WANT US TO.’ DIPLOMATIC EFFORTS ARE CONTINUING—BUT SUCCESS ISN’T RATED HIGHLY. TAKE GRAB DOWNER A.M. ‘YES I THINK AS DIPLOMATIC SOLUTION IS STILL POSSIBLE, I’M NOT SAYING IT’S PROBABLE.’ TAKE GRAB RICHARD BUTLER FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT ‘EVERYBODY HOPES THERE WILL BE A DIPLOMATIC SOLUTION, IF THAT WORKS THEN THOSE GOOD TROOPS OF OURS WON’T HAVE TO GO INTO ANY SORT OF ACTION.’ LATE TODAY KIM BEAZLEY FOLLOWED BY THE PRIME MINISTER ARRIVED TO GIVE THEIR FAREWELL MESSAGE IN PERSON TO THE S.A.S. SOLDIERS. THEY’LL FLY OUT LATER THIS EVENING. CATHERINE MCGRATH ABC NEWS CANBERRA.

McGrath puts a pen star beside the line ‘BUT THERE IS SOME DISSENT’. ‘That’s what I mean. No comment. Just a straight throw.’ This is what McGrath describes as ‘playing a straight bat’—giving the dissenting opinion, but not in such a way that one can be accused of bias. None of the commercial stations bothered to chase Lees or Albanese. The two grabs of dissenting opinion are what, McGrath feels, gives her report extra depth, an extra dimension. But all this must be done carefully. It is not easy to get two grabs. There are logistical difficulties—limited camera crews, limited time. So the decision to get this material is significant, and a value judgment involving a choice about what to say and how to say it. ‘You can report criticism, but you just have to be very fair and straight about it’, McGrath reflects. ‘My aim is to give as multifaceted coverage as possible, while still saying in the game. … It’s a bit like working in Asia. You can still say it, but you just have to be care-

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ful how you say it.’ On the morning that Nick Sherry tried to commit suicide, Cath McGrath was moving house. She listened to the radio and heard that he was in hospital. She forgot about it as she took her daughter to childcare, and raced back home to meet the removalists. Then she got a call from the childcare centre. Her daughter had fallen off the slide and was injured. Half an hour later McGrath was carrying her screaming child through the carpark of the Woden hospital. At the door she met the ABC camera crew, and was momentarily puzzled about why they had bothered to attend, before realising they were there to cover Nick Sherry, who had been admitted. Anastasia had broken her collar bone. Nick Sherry had slashed his wrists. On her way out of the hospital, McGrath filled her colleagues in on Anastasia’s progress. They filled her in on Nick Sherry’s. ‘Only in Canberra’, she thought. Nick Sherry attempted suicide after being savaged in Parliament by Peter Costello. Sherry had claimed travel allowances for overnight stays when he was visiting his mother who lived at Opossum Bay outside Hobart. Costello was witty and cutting. ‘Hello possum’, he said, to roars of laughter from public and press galleries. ‘Hello possum.’ Sherry slashed his wrists. The press gallery, I discover, has very little sympathy for him. ‘Yes. A Tasmanian Senator. I guess you’d have to be worried if you were Tasmanian and NOT a senator’, one senior reporter said. He then expressed his contempt for a man who would deliver his suicide note to the media. On the other hand, the gallery is unanimously sympathetic to the anonymous AAP reporter who received Sherry’s suicide note, delivered late on Thursday night. The reporter was junior, as anyone rostered on so early in the morning must necessarily be. She made coffee, went to the toilet and read the papers before she opened the mail. For this, she has felt guilty ever since. At least, that is the way the gallery tells the story. That is the gossip about what the reporter did, and how she feels. When I ask for the name of the reporter, so I can interview her, nobody knows. ‘It’s just what I’ve heard’, the senior reporter tells me. ‘It’s what people say.’ Meanwhile they point out that Sherry has not been reluctant to

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seek publicity for his suffering. He wrote a personal explanation of his actions which appeared on the front page of the Australian.18 Later an account of his romance with a nurse who cared for him in hospital appeared in a magazine. The gallery is contemptuous. This publicity-seeking offends their notions of what should remain private and what should remain public. His suffering was not something it pleased them to report. And again I hear the claim: ‘The gallery has always been good about respecting the boundary between private and public lives. We are not, thank God, like they are in America.’ The day after interviewing McGrath I take Lachlan in a sling into the parliamentary press gallery overlooking the House of Representatives. He is sleeping, and makes no noise. I have sat here for several days now through question time, although I don’t have the special pass you need to sit in the press gallery. I have never been questioned. Armed with a notebook, dressed in a navy blue suit, talking to other journalists, I looked like I fitted in. Nobody questions that I belong. I get the access I need. With the baby in the sling, I last a quarter of an hour before being thrown out by the security guards. In Canberra, it is important to understand which parts of one’s personal life are acceptable. Not all are considered fair trade. In particular, motherhood is an underground activity. One of my mentors at the Age was Sally White, then a feature writer, formerly an executive who had helped the ground-breaking chief of David Syme and Co, Ranald McDonald, steer a steady path between his many enthusiasms, and later a teacher of journalism. She gave me much advice. One piece I didn’t follow was that I should never get drunk with my colleagues. This, she said, inspired only contempt and depression. In 1991 White published a text book on journalism called Reporting in Australia. It is full of good advice, though unfortunately the bit about drinking is omitted. In the introduction, she writes: ‘I’ve lost count of the times I’ve asked prospective students or aspiring cadet reporters “Why do you want to be a journalist?” I’ve also lost count of the times that the answer has been the same: “I really love writing and my teacher thinks I’m good at English and I like

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meeting people”. But I know exactly how many times the answer: “Because I want to know what’s going on” revealed a person who intuitively understood the heart of reporting eight times in twenty years.’19 When I was a cadet my answer to Sally White’s question would have been of the “good at English” type, but I do agree with her that the heart of reporting can be very simply stated—letting people know what’s going on. But the simplicity of that statement is deceptive, because finding out what is going on is a complicated thing to do. To find out, you have to get close, and that entails subtle agreements, deals and understandings. You have to be the right sort of person, or at least pretend to be. You can say what you want, but you have to be careful how you say it.

3 Feeling A few minutes ago, I cut my finger on a sheet of paper, but I can’t write that pain. I can only tell you what happened with words, and ask you to imagine how it felt. It really isn’t surprising that the press gallery feels more for the AAP reporter than for Nick Sherry. There is a difference between what we feel when we hear about a public figure’s misfortune or private joy or pain, and what we feel when the person suffering is known to us. The public figures’ stories usually seem simpler because they come to us in code. ‘Bad Marriage’, ‘Lurid Past’, ‘Infidelity’, ‘The Other Side of Saint Cheryl’. The act of reporting at once connects us with these people, yet also creates a distance. We never really know their pain. It is not possible for reporting to give you this kind of knowledge. Only experience, or imagination, can do that. In the introduction to the Faber Book of Reportage John Carey, Merton Professor of English at Oxford University, talks about how reporters must resist the slide of language into sameness, and distancing from the real. 20 He asks: ‘What makes reportage good?’ In replying to his own question he quotes Stendhal’s account, in La Chartreuse de Parme, of a soldier’s experiences at Waterloo. Suddenly they all moved off at full gallop. A few minutes later Fabrizio saw, twenty paces ahead of him, a piece of tilled land that was being ploughed up in a singular fashion. The bottoms of the furrows were full of water, and the very damp soil that formed the ridges of these furrows was flying about in little black lumps flung three or four feet into the air. Fabrizio noted this curious effect as he was passing; then his mind turned to dreaming of the Marshal and his glory. He heard a sharp cry close by him; it was the two hussars falling struck by shot. … At that moment the escort began to go at a tearing pace, and our hero realised that it was shot from the guns that was making the earth fly up all around him.

Carey comments that Stendhal has managed to avoid the usual relations between language and reality, the distancing that usually

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results from using a coded linguistic formula such as ‘I am under fire’. Instead, Stendhal tells us what Fabrizio actually sees, and only later tells us what it means. ‘The power of language to confront us with the vivid, the frightening or the unaccustomed is equalled only by its opposite—the power of language to muffle any such alarms. Either power is available for language-users, but bad reportage opts firmly for the second.’ Carey concludes that: ‘The good reporter must cultivate the innocent eye, but he must not be innocent.’ The reporter must talk about blood, and killing, and war, not adopt the circumlocutions of casualties and offences and strategy. Yet the reporting of the Canberra press gallery is full of such distancing. Politicians have knee jerk reactions. They call for things. They condemn things. They appeal to things. They do all sorts of things that are presented in a coded language, a sort of Canberraspeak that is not only distant from the way things really happen or are decided upon, but also masks the personal element, the aching heart, the compromised belief, the friends and enemies and who drinks out of whose coffee cup, and who lies to whom, and who loves whom, and all the other whispers and shouts and joys and sadnesses that happen in that big well-kept building under the smooth green lawn. ‘Canberra-speak’ is an odd vernacular. It is hard for an outsider to understand. How many of us really comprehend the codes in which the stories on the front pages of our newspapers are written? How many of us read the pages of comment and analysis in the Saturday papers for pleasure or enlightenment, rather than out of a sense of tiresome duty? I have in front of me the major metropolitan newspapers published during the first week of the 1998 summer. This was an averagely exceptional week in Canberra. On the front pages politicians have done somersaults and about-turns; they have upped the ante; they have downplayed things. The movement of people away from private health insurance is described on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald, without irony, as an exodus. Political parties have backed away from things. They have softened and in other cases hardened—and the thing they have softened or hardened is always their ‘stance’. Politicians have failed to deny—and isn’t that a loaded

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phrase? And yet how frequently you see it, particularly when the gallery already knows what is about to happen, and yet is bound by some subtle or not so subtle agreement not to report it. Canberraspeak is code, a language for insiders. It is paradoxical. It tells you what is going on, and at the same time makes it impossible for you to find out. On one front page in a story about the economy, a Canberra press gallery reporter talks about a ‘spending spree’ by shoppers helping to ‘fireproof the Australian economy and pointing to a bumper Christmas’. How can a spending spree point to anything? And what exactly is meant by that coded phrase, that you hear everywhere now, ‘fireproof the economy’. This is code—insiders’ shorthand. Most people don’t really understand what it means. It merely indicates an area of debate, of possible events and non-events, that are understood well, by the people who understand such things. By the insiders. The rest of us are left with our noses pressed against the window, not quite able to see in. I can hear the journalists protest it is all very well for me, who has had the time to review and to hone, to criticise them when they write to a deadline. But this is not only bad writing, it is also insidious, and dangerous. It gives the impression of communicating, while failing to do so. The shrillness, the search for false impact, in fact reduces the impact. Canberra-speak is a clumsy language, hard to use as a tool with which to think. Of course it is full of clichés. But it is more distressing than that. Metaphor is the most powerful tool a writer can use. Without metaphor, it is almost impossible to think, let alone to desire change. Yet in the hands of political writers, metaphor is reduced to a sort of hyped-up deadness that is, when you stop and think about it, quite unnerving. Glenn Milne, one of the gallery leaders, writes in his column in the Australian: ‘A bit’s been written lately about John Howard’s structural and strategic responses to his second term. But when it comes to the inner man, Howard would probably prefer you to look at the 400 kg gorilla’. As an introduction, this is odd enough to be interesting. What

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gorilla? Why 400 kilograms? You are hooked. You read on. But then the ideas begin to blur. ‘While his political ambition still burns bright, Howard Mark II is a much more resolved person than his previous incarnations. This has important implications for the way he intends to run his Government. And, more importantly, for those who aspire to succeed him. ‘Which brings us to the gorilla. Howard, lashed in a harness of his own making, dragged the GST in a cage behind him, from dawn till dusk, day in, day out, during the election campaign, through the sands of history. Yet few have acknowledged his outstanding achievement. ‘Virtually single-handed, Howard talked King Kong down off the Empire State Building and into the living rooms of ordinary Australians …’ The column continues in much the same sort of language. Milne says Howard’s sense of ‘pride and personal settlement’ will have ‘concrete ramifications for the nature of his second incarnation’. There is talk of ‘taking the trainer wheels off the likes of Peter Costello, Peter Reith and Michael Wooldridge’. Milne writes of ‘the marketplace of the second term’. The penultimate paragraph begins ‘For those voters who bought Labor’s spin the first time around, it’s a message that is unlikely to bite’. 21 And so on. Reproduced like this, out of context, away from the rush and hubbub of events and pseudo events, the writing almost parodies itself. What does Milne actually mean? What relation do his words bear to reality? Why, for example, is the GST in a cage (other than to allow Howard to drag it). Why is it then on top of the Empire State Building? Who is the gorilla—the inner Howard or the GST? How is it possible to talk anyone (or anything) ‘down’ with a single hand? How is it possible for a message to bite? The metaphors and the colour are meant to increase the effect and impact. In fact they reduce it. The whole column, and its overblown language, suggest to us that something momentous is happening, when the reality is a

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change of rhetoric, or more likely, the promise and expectation, contained in briefings from Howard’s minders and enlarged by the informal caucusing between lift and canteen, of a change of rhetoric. The whole column could be summed up with a sentence: ‘The word is, Howard is going to be different this time around, and the senior ministers are going to have to work harder’. I don’t mean to suggest that Milne is exceptional, although it is true this column is a particularly lurid example. But we all know the way the comment pieces, the pieces that are meant to lead gallery opinion, seem to the outsider. Reading them is like hearing a song. You recognise the words and the rhythm, and whether or not it makes internal sense is less important. I’m not sure you take in much information. You think that you do because you recognise what sort of song it is. It’s the political analysis song, the same way it might be a pop song or a blues song. You absorb the mood. The language pretends to be the language of interrogation and insight, yet is neither. How many times now have you read that Howard would be different in his second term? The gallery agrees on this. You might not remember the words of the song, or the reasoning, content, or the argument, but I bet you have absorbed the tune by now. The song carries over to television and radio. Everything is compacted, of course. There is no time for King Kongs or the sands of history, but the snatches of melody are the same. The code words are the same. Fireproofing. Exodus. Melt down. Backflip. Backdown. And the most frightening thing is that the language itself prevents you from thinking differently. The language becomes the language in which politics actually happens. The code becomes the only available vocabulary. Reporting increases the distance between what governments actually do—their policies and actions in the world ‘out there’—and the way the game of politics is played. Perhaps on second thoughts, the underlying factor is not an increasing distance, just less policy and more game. The game becomes everything, and appearance becomes reality. On third thoughts, perhaps it’s more that we just can’t tell. If the media reports only the way the game is played, how are we to know whether the serious policy work, the serious intellectual work of governance, is going on somewhere else, out of view? Or

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not going on? We don’t know. We can’t know. We don’t know what is going on. Most of the time, we haven’t even got the language to formulate the necessary questions. Why is it that people have never before been more disillusioned with politicians? Why, in particular, is this happening at a time when polling techniques and sophisticated research mean politicians are better informed than ever before about what people think, and what they want? I think language is at the core. The language of politics with its hyped up deadness has turned people away, and made it so easy for them to believe the worst—or to believe in nothing at all. They watch closely, the reporters in Canberra. But sometimes they watch and they don’t report, and sometimes they watch and report. They know the code. What it means when the bells ring. What it means when they don’t. They know the rules, and it is a long time since anyone has seriously questioned them. For the most part, they know how it is to be done, what should remain secret, and what secrets are to become news, what is off the record, and what is not, and how such agreements are to be negotiated, broken and kept. They know how this thing called reporting is to be done. In the nervous, informal caucusing of the inexperienced, in the inside knowledge of the heavy-hitters, in the weighty opinions of the ex-Gods, we have a quest not for the innocent eye, but for the know-it-all eye. How I wish we could peel all this back, peel our eyes and our nerve endings, and start again with clarity and hope, and tell people what is going on.

O Those people who are old enough, and stayers enough, to have a memory of what the press gallery used to be like, say that one of the main changes is the amount of material that is on the public record these days. Most of this material lands in the boxes on the second floor of the Senate side of Parliament House. The big bureaus, like

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News Limited, have secretarial staff whose job it is to clear these boxes regularly. From there the material will be farmed out to specialist reporters, or end up on the desk of the bureau chiefs. I was allowed to look through the contents of one of these boxes at eleven in the morning on a fairly average day. Already there was about a ream of paper. There were three transcripts of radio interviews given by Government ministers, including one by the Prime Minister. There was also a transcript of an interview given by a minister on the Channel Nine Sunday program—Laurie Oakes’ showcase. This is one of the other changes in the way the gallery works. In the era of the God correspondent, the newspapers set the agenda. Michelle Grattan commented recently that print journalists now spend as much time processing ‘source material’ from the electronic media—transcripts of electronic media broadcasts—as chasing material of their own. ‘A generation ago television was very much the small newcomer in political coverage from the Canberra Gallery. It operated on a shoe string and fed a lot off the newspapers. Now its needs shape the way political events are presented, and the newspapers feed off it. That is not to say that newspapers do not frequently set the agenda. But television (and radio) as often determine it.’ 22 What else was in the box? Twenty-eight press releases, mostly from the Government and the Opposition, but with a few from the Democrats and Greens and Independents. Many of them were commenting on what had been said that day or the day before on radio and television. Others were dry summaries of bureaucratic reports released. All of this paper, all this material, would have to be read or scanned, thought about, rejected or accepted, before any reporter trying to find out what was going on could even begin to think about pursuing their own ideas, or telephoning that backbencher for the ‘good oil’ on what happened in caucus, or having lunch with that minister, or cultivating that contact in the bureaucracy, or doing any of those things that might cause the day to take off in unexpected directions, beyond the reach of the media managers. The verbiage, as Laura Tingle puts it, can be mind-numbing.

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O I meet a former God in Aussies. Like all the former Gods, this correspondent does not want to be identified. The correspondent vigorously agrees with me when I say that having followed the gallery around as it trooped from one event to another, its reporting seems to me to be very stagey. The correspondent says that the gallery has had three distinct eras. In the old days during and immediately after World War Two, the gallery was much smaller and briefings from politicians were frequent and intimate. This the correspondent describes as the ‘cosy’ stage. Then came a second phase through the 1960s and 1970s—a period the correspondent has trouble giving a neat tag. Finally, in the 1980s and 1990s, the gallery has become theatrical. This is the ‘stagey’ stage. I pressed the correspondent to find a tag for the 1960s and 1970s (which was of course the period when the power of the God correspondent was at its peak). The correspondent finally calls it the ‘free market’ period. This was a time when people went in different directions and developed their own contacts across a broad field, within the bureaucracy as well as within Parliament. It was a time when policy makers in the bureaucracy and the politicians read the papers, and could be influenced by what they saw there. ‘We were part of an intellectual community. The gallery leaders were part of a whole intellectual community in this town that was part of how policy was developed’, the correspondent recalls. Now, the gallery is on the outside. ‘Is there no influence then?’ ‘The media influence how the game is played. We don’t influence policy.’ In the early days, a Canberra correspondent would have access to the feature pages of the newspapers to write big pieces on health, or education, or whatever. Now the lines between information and news are blurred. Market pressures are felt by editors in ways that they weren’t before. Newspapers always had to make profits, but now the demand is for huge profits. There are more ‘lift-out’ supplements and lifestyle guides. Staff reporters in the state capitals, rather than

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gallery reporters in Canberra, control and dominate the feature pages. The former God correspondent tells me that the young people in the gallery these days are far more cynical than their predecessors. This, the former God says is part of a broader trend—a sadder, more cynical world in which people are cynical about politics. This is, of course, partly because it is reported to them cynically ‘I suppose we came from a generation that didn’t have much to be cynical about’, says the deposed God, sadly. There are photos on the walls of the corridor of the second floor of the Senate side of Parliament House showing the members of the press gallery from its inception to the present day. Until the 1960s often barely more than a dozen journalists lined up to have their picture taken. Nearly all are middle-aged men, dressed in suits, their posture speaking of gravitas and consequence. The more-up-to-date photos are full of colour, conventionally unconventional hair-dos, women in red suits, and smiling young people gathered in more informal clumps. On a superficial level, you would have to say that the gallery is now more diverse than ever before, and yet there is a sameness underpinning the differences. Nobody is poor. Nobody is out of fashion. Nobody is ugly. Like the building, they are polished. Like the building, they are well groomed. Like the building, they are high maintenance. And in the later photos, of course, not everyone is there. Gathering the enormously busy press gallery together for a photo is no longer an easy exercise. Always, some of them will be off doing more important things, or things that seemed more important on the day. History—the making of an historical record like a press gallery photograph—is less important than it once was. So what are the main differences between the gallery in days gone by and the gallery now? Today’s reporters are more confident in their tenure in Parliament House. They have every reason to be so: when the new Parliament House was built, the most extensive office facilities ever provided were set aside for them. It is many decades since anyone in power seriously suggested that the media should be excluded from Parliament House. Today’s reporters move faster. Attention spans are shorter. Television and radio demand an instantaneous response that would have been quite foreign only a short while ago. As well, it is harder

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for the average reporter to have direct access to politicians. The sheer numbers of reporters, and the modern invention of the political media manager, mean that press releases are the closest some ever get to the horse’s mouth. But as for the rest, things that tend to be criticised as recently developed weaknesses or strengths in journalism can be seen rather as extrapolation of century-old tradition. It is common to say that journalism is harder these days than it once was. Although the difficulties may have changed, as a blanket statement that is almost certainly untrue. The conventions of political reporting that still inform the Canberra press gallery date back to Westminster and the days when the Parliament declared that it was contemptuous to publish accounts of parliamentary proceedings because it was ‘Highly prejudicial to the interests of gentlemen in their boroughs’.23 In the eighteenth century some printers and publishers were even imprisoned for parliamentary reporting. For many decades reporters were officially ‘strangers’ in Parliament, able to be cleared out at any moment, given no special facilities and excluded from the public gallery whenever the ‘gentlemen’ chose. Reporters seen using notebooks had them struck from their hands by parliamentary attendants. But by the nineteenth century, the patterns, symbioses, tolerances and understandings of political reporting had begun to take shape. When an important speech by William Pitt on the war with Napoleon was not reported in 1803, the Speaker ordered that a bench should be set aside for reporters—the first recognition that the journalists’ task was important to the proper operation of parliamentary democracy, and sometimes of benefit to politicians. When the House of Commons was rebuilt after a fire in 1834, a ‘reporters’ gallery’ together with writing rooms was incorporated in the design. By late in the century the facilities had expanded and so had the form of reporting. Although pages and pages of the newspapers were devoted to verbatim and summarised parliamentary debates, the ‘think piece’ had begun. ‘A reporter sat on the lobby stairs one night wondering what he was going to write on a dull parliamentary day. Gladstone, then Prime Minister, was coming down the stairs and absent-mindedly asked the journalist to let him go by. Up jumped the Lobby corre-

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spondent and stood aside, thanked by the Great Man. Readers of his paper the next morning were no doubt suitably impressed when they read a political story which began “meeting Mr Gladstone this evening in the Lobby I had a brief but interesting conversation with him”. The half-column that followed contained nothing really new, mainly a repetition of Gladstone’s recent speeches, but the implied access to the Great Man gave it the savour of an exclusive story.’24 Before long the ‘Lobby’ was sealed off, and only journalists and political agents allowed access. Soon the ‘Lobby system’ became a conduit of official information quite separate from the reporter’s gallery, and with its own conventions and subtle agreements and alliances. The Lobby system is one of the most important differences between Westminster political reporting and the Australian hybrid and remains in the United Kingdom to this day. It represents an explicit acknowledgment of an elite, and the interdependence between reporters and reported, but has never been formally transported to Australia. In Australian political reporting, initially in the Parliaments of the colonies that were to become Australia, the journalists who filled the galleries and recorded parliamentary debates were the same as those who hung around outside offices and in the lobbies. Gradually word-for-word accounts of parliamentary debates gave way to summaries, and even comment. By the time the first Federal Parliament began sitting in Melbourne in 1901, ‘rounds’ reporting had been established, where specialist reporters would arrive at the Parliament and visit departments in turn, calling on ministers and bureaucrats. The rounds reporters cooperated, arriving in groups and coordinating their questions to extract maximum information. ‘Caucusing’ was well established, and barely questioned. Sometimes reporters from different papers would divide up the tasks for the day, and pool the results. It was a practice well accepted by reporters and ministers, although apparently discouraged by newspaper managements. In this, little has changed. Technically, reporters were still ‘strangers’ in Parliament, with every word they wrote a breach of privilege. But after an investigation of an alleged breach of privilege by the Bulletin in the early 1900s, a joint select committee made it clear that the powers to pun-

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ish for contempt and breach of privilege should be held in reserve ‘to be used only when necessary to keep every idle slanderer or reckless libeller in the community from impugning the honour of Parliament’25. The main battles were over journalists’ access to the parliamentary library and gardens. The House Committee revoked many of these privileges and in return a list of the House Committee members was distributed among the gallery members with the understanding that no publicity should be given to these parliamentarians. The Speaker found copies of the list posted in the newspaper offices headed ‘The Lousy List’ and ‘The Roll of Honour’. He removed them and journalists were locked out of Parliament until an apology was received and approved. Some journalists claimed the bad feeling after this incident lasted until the 1930s. For the first but certainly not the last time, journalists had actively tried to impose pressure on parliamentarians by exercise of a press veto. On this occasion, the Parliament won. In the years that followed, journalists’ access to the gardens and library and even the official dining room was gradually curtailed. When the gallery moved to Canberra in the 1920s, the whole character of the job changed. Politicians and journalists were thrown together in crowded accommodation in what was meant to be only a provisional Parliament House. At first, most of the machinery of the executive remained in Melbourne. This meant that ministers got into the habit of running their departments from their Parliament House offices, rather than from within their departments. Later, this persisted even when the bureaucracy moved to the new capital, since roads were often muddy, and transport difficult. Thus a particularly Australian sort of claustrophobia came to political reporting, with politicians and reporters, most of them away from home, doing the business of journalism and government within eavesdropping distance of each other. This was the beginning of ‘us and them’. This was the beginning of ‘cosy’. By 1933, there were only about twenty-three reporters at peak strength during parliamentary sessions. Married journalists began to settle in Canberra. Younger journalists still used hostels and barracks. The divisions between the heavy-hitters and the others began, with

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appointments to senior Canberra positions becoming prized jobs with salaries at the top of the award scales or higher, supplemented by housing and expense allowances. ‘These perks were reinforced by totems of social acceptability, such as membership of sporting and social clubs where senior journalists mingled with senior public servants and diplomats’.26 In the 1930s, the introduction of the bakelite desktop telephone made the telephoning of copy through to head office easier and quicker. Less urgent copy still went by train and plane, but the impact of technology, with its demands for quicker and quicker responses, had begun. Soon after the move to Canberra, the Bruce-Page Government lost office on the floor of the House of Representatives, then was crushed at an election. When James Scullin, a former journalist, became Prime Minister, the press expected a special relationship, and although this wasn’t always fulfilled, there were occasions when he took journalists into his confidence. J. A. Alexander, the eminent correspondent for the Melbourne Herald remembered one of the first confidential briefings from Prime Minister to reporters—a turning point in the history of the gallery, and the beginning of the cementing of the alliances between those who worked in Parliament House. ‘I well remember the day during the worst stages of the economic depression of the early 1930s that the top men in Canberra received an urgent summons to his [Scullin’s] room. There in confidence he told them of the growing crisis and of the Bank of England’s decision to send a special man to Australia to advise and assist the Government. This information was not to be made public at that stage, but was to be passed on to editors only for their guidance and to prepare them for the public announcement to be made later. … No Prime Minister had ever done such a thing before. This fact, and the grave, almost distressed demeanour of Mr Scullin at this meeting made a profound impression on those who participated in this conference. All emerged from that meeting with a new sense of responsibility. I think that day marked one of the turning points in the history of the gallery.’27 Scullin, and his immediate successors, held at least daily press briefings. Although Scullin was well liked personally, the media was

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remorseless in criticising his economic policies. In retrospect, the media probably failed to either grasp or report what was really going on. Geoff Sparrow has commented: ‘By today’s standards the Depression of the 1930s was appallingly covered by the newspapers. … We reported the miserable end results, the unemployment, the evictions and hunger marches, and pretty inadequately at that I think, but we did little to help people understand why it was all happening to them, or whether the Government was right or wrong in the policy it was following. Today we would have had economists and finance writers and commentators of all kinds analysing, disagreeing, debating and criticising.’28 The Scullin Government was marked by tempestuous party meetings with rows during crises being heard all over Parliament House. Reporters sat in their rooms behind the press gallery and could hear snatches of argument from the party room. ‘Journalists, far from attempting to “listen in” to forbidden places were embarrassed in their efforts to get far enough away from the disturbance to be able to proclaim that they were making no effort to try and overhear it.’29 But there were also disagreements about what constituted ‘eavesdropping’. J. A. Alexander got hold of cables between Scullin, Lyons and the acting Prime Minister Fenton, written while Scullin was in London. In them, Scullin condemned policies advocated by the Labor caucus as ruinous for the Government. Infuriated by their publication, the Government told the Commonwealth police to investigate. The Speaker also called in Alexander for an explanation, and demanded to know the source of his information. Alexander refused to reveal it and was excluded from the precincts of Parliament The profession appealed to Scullin on Alexander’s behalf expecting the former journalist to understand how the job of journalism was done. Alexander protested he had got the information in an ‘honourable and legitimate’ way—that is, that it had been leaked to him, and he hadn’t resorted to theft or bribery. But Scullin wasn’t swayed by professional sentiments. The publishing of leaked documents, he said, was not acceptable journalism. ‘Journalists are admitted into public departments and offices of Cabinet ministers on the understanding that they are gentlemen and

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men of honour: that they will not seek to acquire surreptitiously information to which they are not entitled; that they will not handle confidential state papers not intended for their perusal. … If there are pressmen who insist upon a lower standard, and who would adopt no better role of conduct than that of the eavesdropper, it becomes necessary to protect the public interest and public confidence.’ After the fall of Scullin, the gallery settled into a more routine existence under the Lyons Government. The ABC began its own news service, having previously relied on that provided by the newspapers. Political commentary on radio became important for the first time. But things in the gallery were at their cosiest when Australia was at war during the 1940s. Prime Minister John Curtin gave the gallery confidential briefings twice a day. One of the reasons for the briefings was so the correspondents could pass the information provided by Curtin on to their editors and proprietors. In the introduction to their book about the briefings, Clem Lloyd and Richard Hall comment: ‘By keeping the upper echelons of the press “in the know” about war strategy, the government could ensure the preservation of national security information … but the sacred “off the record” conventions of the profession meant that it would not be written or commented on in editorials. Where necessary, material from the briefings could be converted to attributable news by Curtin simply placing it on the record. Today this would be stigmatised as “news management”, or even news manipulation. Its practice by Curtin, however, had the irreproachable virtue of being indisputably in the national interest, and arguably in the very survival of a foreign nation.’30 Curtin had more faith in the senior journalists of the gallery than any Prime Minister since. The dozen or so reporters who went to the briefings knew more about the progress of the war than many members of Parliament. Don Whitington, correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, has described the briefings. Curtin would relax in his swivel chair, light a cigarette, lean back and ‘think out loud’.31 A former journalist himself, Curtin was comfortable with the media, and they with him. This was, perhaps, the last time when journalists and politicians

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saw themselves as being quite explicitly and unmistakably on the same side, without that being a source of shame for either of them. Over the long haul of Menzies’ reign, press conferences went from daily to weekly, then dropped off even more. In 1951, Menzies said he would supplement the press conferences with background talks for senior journalists, but they soon fizzled out. In 1958, he appointed Sydney journalist Robert Kennedy as his special assistant. Menzies told the journalists this would help them to get access, but in fact it was the beginning of the media-minder curtain between reporters and Ministers. All Ministers started to become inaccessible to the habitual regular calls of the roundsmen. The handout, or news release, which once was just a supplement to reporting, became a major news system in itself. It was also during Menzies’ reign that the cosiness between politicians and media was most threatened. The new Speaker, Archie Cameron, abolished the peppercorn rental the media paid for their parliamentary offices. He did so, he said, because he held the view that ‘the press was here by grace and not by right. … If people pay rental, they have tenant rights, and in my view, the press should never have a tenant right in this place’.32 Cameron also threatened journalists found playing cards in the common room with expulsion, and again tried to exclude journalists from some areas of Parliament House, including the library, because of complaints that they ‘eavesdropped’. The chairman of the Australian Newspaper Council, Sir Frank Packer, wrote to Menzies objecting. He explicitly stated that part of the Canberra press gallery’s job was to report what happened in the whole of the House, as well as during proceedings. ‘Journalists employed at Canberra are always prepared to use discretion, and particularly use certain parts of Parliament House discreetly, and any measure which is designed to restrict the gathering of news or to restrict the activities of journalists in such a way as to make it impossible or difficult for them to report fairly and accurately what happens in Parliament House as such as distinct from what happens in two chambers, we feel is wrong. We cannot accept the view that Parliament House is a kind of private club for members.’ Another way of looking at it is to say that what Packer was really arguing for was not the abolition of the club, but rather admis-

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sion to it. In his claim that journalists understood the need for discretion, he was saying that they already understood the rules. Tensions over ‘eavesdropping’ continued. The absence of a formal ‘lobby’ system meant there was no firm ethical distinction drawn between reporting what occurred in the chambers, and reporting what happened in the corridors. This was further complicated by the fact that so much of executive government happened within the walls of Parliament House, rather than in departmental buildings, where journalists had less access. In 1954, Cameron acted against the Sydney Daily Mirror after an incident in the parliamentary dining room. He said: ‘I simply lay down that remarks made in the dining room, the Library, the King’s Hall, the lobbies and so forth are not to be printed by the newspapers except with the express approval of the member concerned, which approval must be obtained beforehand’. Asked to amplify, Cameron said: ‘The only matter to which I referred was the right of a member to make remarks—and heaven knows, most of us I think make them at times when we are off guard … without the risk of those remarks appearing in print without his express approval, obtained beforehand’.33 With these constant disputes needling journalists, there were attempts made by some to break the gallery’s reliance on parliamentary space. There was talk of the media building ‘Newspaper House’ to accommodate all the Canberra newspaper offices. At that time, many journalists thought a separate press building was necessary if the media were to be independent. But although the cosy era with the politicians was coming to an end (or a recess), within the media ‘club’ arrangements existed which ensured that nobody could possibly be scooped. Copy was swapped. Nobody broke stories without duly informing those newspapers with which they had copy swapping agreements. Clem Lloyd has commented, ‘In many ways “the Club” enshrined mediocrity. The fruits of the most skilled were delivered to the less efficient; in return the better journalists had their flanks guarded and could always rely on a cover for routine news’. In his recently published book The Whispering Gallery, Hal Myers, who was one of the youngest ever senior political correspondents in Canberra during the Menzies era, recalled that journalists in the gallery

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‘formed defensive alliances, not necessarily known to their head offices. … We showed each other “blacks”—carbon copies—of all our stories’. Myers also recalled the difficulties of balancing the need for access with the expectation of independence. As a reporter on the political scene and as a commentator and columnist you were in danger of offending two different sets of politicians, and possibly not having any political friends left. But you couldn’t get good political stories without political friends. … I decided that my priority would be to build up my news sources. … The result of this decision was that my weekly column took second place. Sometimes it read that way. I somewhat reluctantly put aside the news for a day each week, often with little preparation and little idea of what I should write about, straining to find an opening thought. At other times I was more than ready with something to say, but these were usually the times when I did make a new enemy or irritated an old one.34

As Menzies’ long reign came to an end, times were changing in journalism as well. Old understandings began to break down. Graham Perkin, the great editor of the Age, encouraged his Canberra bureau chief, Alan Barnes, to break stories. The Australian, then a brand new publication founded in hope and idealism, hired unconventional people and encouraged them to write in unconventional ways. Right from the start, the Australian refused to operate within the club system. Its reporters were instructed not to swap copy. Meanwhile, Max Walsh at the Australian Financial Review, which also refused to join the club, began producing longer interpretive and analytical reports. The ’cosy’ stage ended and the era of the ‘free market’ began. The early success of the Australian was made possible by the innovative journalism of the fortnightly Nation, which was founded in 1958. Its investigative style and sceptical analysis, and some of its best contributors, were adopted by the Australian when it was launched in 1964. Later Nation merged with the Melbourne Sunday Review and as Nation Review published the political columns of Mungo MacCallum, who was cheeky and naughty, but best of all wrote about what was happening in Canberra in a very direct fashion that came like a shock of cold water after the long decades of clubishness. Nation and Nation Review served as a nursery for the best political journalism of the 1970s. This was also the era of leaks. Both in Canberra and elsewhere,

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groundbreaking journalism came to depend on alliances and contacts within the public service, leading to the leaking of documents. Sometimes, the critics said, reporters became nothing more than conduits for internal public service battles. Nevertheless, the reporters published what they received. In 1972 the Whitlam Government came to power, and for the first time large numbers of the press gallery journalists took jobs as Government media advisors.35 The press gallery was growing in size and importance. When Bob Hawke came to government, there were 146 journalists with parliamentary passes issued by the Speaker. By 1990, there were 271. For the first time, the parliamentary press gallery began to be recognised as important and influential in its own right. And of course it was criticised. Gerard Henderson (former Howard advisor and currently executive director of the Sydney Institute) coined the term ‘the ratpack’, to describe how they followed each other around. When I began my career as a journalist in the early 1980s, nobody would have suggested that journalists and politicians were on the same side, but there were many suggestions that the press gallery and the Government were naturally in sympathy—that they shared a world view. Derek Parker, a former Liberal Party staffer, wrote a book about the gallery’s relationship with the Hawke Government called The Courtesans, in which he observed: ‘Power without responsibility is the asset of the courtesan. Power without responsibility is the defining trait of the press gallery in the Hawke era’. To the gallery ‘the game is all … their concern is with the mechanics of power, not its uses’. Parker suggested that the press gallery, being corporatist in nature, was naturally in sympathy with the corporatist flavour of the Hawke Government, in which political power was concentrated among elites. They were therefore biased toward the Hawke Government. Parker suggested that any future conservative Government should throw the press gallery out of Parliament House, and force them to rent their own accommodation, and take their seats in the public gallery.36 Reviewing the book, Michelle Grattan commented: ‘Parker is not the first observer to suggest that journalists might broaden their minds if they were not living cheek by jowl with the politicians.

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Certainly proximity has worked against the best coverage of those Canberra events that are not on the gallery’s doorstep—that is, the machinations of the public service. But Parker’s analysis is excessively framed by his own ideological spectacles; his remedies smack of gross overreaction and … a heavy dose of defeatism that is too influenced by the experience of conservatism in the 1980s.’37 In any case, nobody took up Parker’s suggestion of throwing out the press gallery. Instead, when the move was made to the brand new Parliament House in the late 1980s, the media was again required to pay rent, and thus acquired what Cameron had said they should never have—the rights of a tenant. As well, a press gallery pass gave access, not only to the gallery itself, but to almost all the non-public areas of Parliament House, including the canteen, the library and the lobbies and all those other ill-defined spaces where alliances can be formed, and confidences swapped. People who have been in the gallery a long time say that the move to the new Parliament House detracted from reporting, because it was no longer so easy to watch the movements of politicians. The media offices are many metres of corridors away from the offices of ministers and backbenchers. Things, they say, are not as cozy. On the other hand, the plush spaces of the second floor of the Senate side of Parliament House are an unequivocal statement that the media is there to stay. The crocodiles that wend their way from staged event to staged event are cozy enough, a survivor from the days of copy-swapping, and the unstated agreements between heavyhitters and politicians are an insidious replacement for the more explicit Lobby rules of the Westminster equivalent. The media has become part of the club. Nobody strikes notebooks out of their hands any more. There is no need to. Everyone understands the rules, and for the most part, life proceeds in orderly and predictable fashion. It is clear now that the 1980s were the end of what is now seen as the Golden Era of independent journalism, and the God correspondent. This was the era when the Age was at its height; the brief, non-cozy, exciting post-Nation, post-Watergate period when journalism for a while seemed an occupation for heroes. This was when I came in, as a raw cadet at the Age.

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O I remember as a cadet drinking with Peter Cole-Adams, then an Age executive, in what was known as the Bog Bar, which was a bar in the locker room off the men’s toilets, set up illegally, to sell alcohol to the sub-editors and others working late. In the early 1980s, the Age appointed its first female sub-editors and after a preliminary skirmish and cover-up women were allowed into the Bog Bar. Emancipation sometimes brings the oddest victories. On the occasion in question, Cole-Adams listened tolerantly to whatever gripes and grumbles I and my fellow cadets were visiting upon him, before proclaiming, with the air of a man conveying a great truth, that the one thing we needed to understand in journalism was that the editor was always a bastard. One of the jobs given to the cadets at that time was to write the company newspaper. I decided to interview the newly-arrived editor, Creighton Burns. He had replaced Michael Davie, an Englishman of great urbanity who was greatly loved in retrospect, but had, of course, been a bastard while incumbent. Brimful of naiveté and conviction, I put to Burns the standard gripes about his editorship coming out of conversations in the pub— that there was too much focus on Canberra, that all these long articles on policy were boring the readers. Burns said: ‘I think it is absolutely essential that cabinet ministers are not able to have breakfast in comfort unless they have read the front page of the Age’. Even if this meant boring the readers? He didn’t think that it did. But even if it did occasionally, he thought there were bigger issues at stake. Five years later, when I was more senior but only slightly less naïve, I had many conversations with Burns’ successor, Michael Smith, a man then in his 30s who began his editorship with an address to the staff in which he was so excited, in his taciturn, bound up way, that he seemed to me to be almost bursting out of his shortsleeved shirt. ‘It’s going to be tough, but its going to be exciting’, Smith told the staff. At the time I didn’t doubt that he would be a great editor. (Burns, of course, had proved to be a bastard while incumbent, but was soon missed in retrospect.) Smith backed investigative reporting, which is what I was

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doing at the time, so I thought him wonderful. When I say he backed it, I mean that when stories ran into trouble, or caused controversy, he didn’t back away. He was with you. He was urging you on, albeit in conversations where both sides were sunk in boozy sentimentality, and unexamined convictions of our own righteousness. By this time, my conversations with editors were conducted not earnestly over a tape recorder, but over a scotch and water, and the questions I asked were probably cozier. I had found my way inside. Smith also backed reporting of length and import. I remember talking to him on the night the paper was publishing a big supplement on health insurance. ‘Run it all’, he said to a sub-editor querying the length of a piece by Michelle. ‘They’ll read it all, or they ought to.’ This was the time of Young Warwick Fairfax, when the ownership of the Age was in question. Staff organised and ran the ‘Maintain Your Age’ campaign in which the clannish Melbourne readership became active opponents of the sale of the paper to those seen as unsympathetic to independent journalism. The campaign advocated asking prospective proprietors to sign a charter of editorial independence. The charter formalised the Chinese walls between commerce and journalism that had, in theory anyway, operated at the Age. The editor answered not to the board, but to management and was not to be part of the board. The editor was to be given a budget, then left to manage within it, without further interference. The proprietors were to acknowledge that journalists ‘must record the affairs of the city, state, nation and the world fairly, fully and regardless of any commercial, political or personal interests, including those of any proprietors, shareholders or board members’.38 I remember Smith said on one occasion: ‘Meg, if we look after our readers, they will look after us.’ He didn’t really expand on the comment. He was a man of few words. But how I loved it, and loved him for saying it! What a luxury it was, after all, to have a job in which it was possible—easy—to believe that one was not only having fun, not only satisfying one’s curiosity, but also serving a high public purpose. Can anyone who has not been on the inside of journalism understand what a drug that can be? The adrenalin of a deadline. The awful thrill of annoying people. Seeing your by-line.

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Adrenalin shots from the imperatives of deadlines. The high of nerves when your words are to be so public, so quickly. And the highs and lows of journalism are so raggedly spaced that you become like one of those pigeons in a psychological experiment, pecking like mad, quite frenetic. ‘Looking after our readers’ meant telling them what was going on, acting as a fourth estate, being independent and sceptical of the powerful, including Government. We would do this, even when on any particular day, strap hanging on the way to work or coping with children or worrying about their mortgage, our readers might prefer that we did not. Smith was not a proponent of lifestyle journalism. We were tough. We were strong. We were macho. We had the Bog Bar! We had self-doubt only privately and alone, if at all. And by now the conversations in the pub (those held in Smith’s absence) had a different tone. Smith didn’t value good writing for good writing’s sake. The paper was too earnest, and too boring. It compared unfavourably with the Sydney Morning Herald, which had, the critics said, a lighter touch. Burns was missed. He had had class, an intellectual edge. Davie was missed. He knew fine writing. And of course, that there was still too much Canberra. Too much Michelle. The editor is always a bastard. Now the pressure was on for change. The company was broke. Two days after I resigned in December 1991, the receivers walked in. Smith lasted for a while, then was replaced by Alan Kohler, who served under the new proprietor, Canadian media baron, Conrad Black. Kohler was part of my generation and like me and my contemporaries had had many conversations in pub and coffee shop about what was wrong with the Age. I have been told that Kohler complained that walking into the Age newsroom was like sinking into a lukewarm bath. It was too comfortable. People like Michelle had been there for too long. The theatre critic had been the sole voice reviewing theatre in Melbourne since we had been in primary school ‘The trouble is’, one reporter commented to me when we discussed the alleged warm-bath comment, ‘he didn’t just add cold

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water, he drained the fucking tub’. In an interview with me in early 1999, Kohler admitted that he had come to the job with a belief that the Age needed change—that it was lazy, and too comfortable. He also admitted that he had perhaps changed things too fast. Key people left. Kohler, believing that Grattan was too dominant, and other talent was not being allowed to develop, offered her a choice: she could either be a commentator, or a reporter. Not both. Michelle left. Peter Cole-Adams left. Margo Kingston left. The theatre critic left. Many other people left. And comfortable old Melbourne didn’t like it. Circulation dropped. Kohler was sacked. Those are the words he uses. They tried to get him to say he had resigned. Today, Kohler says: ‘It was a difficult time. Bad timing. After the “Friends of the Age” thing everyone was waiting for things to go bad under Conrad Black. Everything I did was therefore necessarily seen as bad and destructive’. The editor is always a bastard. After Kohler came Bruce Guthrie, formerly editor of the sister publication Sunday Age. Guthrie changed things again, pushing out key people, promoting and bringing in others. He also continued his difficult relationship with the Premier, Jeff Kennett. Guthrie said to me recently: ‘I think that is the natural relationship, the proper relationship, between a newspaper and politicians. It should always be antagonistic’. Rumour had it that the board was nervous. The board wanted to appoint an editor-in-chief, Steve Harris, over Guthrie, effectively making him second in command. Guthrie protested, lost the battle, and resigned. Today the Age has an editor, Michael Gawenda, and an editorin-chief, Steve Harris, who is also the publisher and is really in charge—and the Chinese walls between editorial and commercial interests, never perfect, no longer appear to exist. Harris argues that such boundaries are old fashioned, and that since it is in the commercial best interests of the paper to have quality editorial content, concerns about threats to editorial independence are overstated. Harris has also expressed qualified support for Kennett’s complaints about the paper under Guthrie’s editorship. Recently, ex-Gods Michelle Grattan and Paul Kelly each pub-

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lished articles on the Canberra press gallery in which they say that the pressures towards commercialisation—bigger profits, more entertainment, more attempts to coax people to keep reading newspapers—have changed the way politics are reported. Grattan wrote: ‘In the late 80s, owners and management were being asked to sign charters of editorial independence. In the late 90s, the concept of such a charter has become virtually a logical nonsense. … It is hardly possible for editors and their staff to be independent of the commercial side of the paper, when editor and appointed manager walk in the same shoes’. Grattan describes how far the process of commercialisation has gone. ‘The modern editor thinks of his paper as a supermarket for readers, selling a guide to modern living as much as a conveyor of news and views. The modern editor is a merchandiser, who relentlessly markets his brand, having devised his product with the help of massive market research. ... While once being “editor” tended not only to be the end of the line, but a destination that gave occupants ultimate personal satisfaction, it is increasingly being seen as a stepladder to a higher corporate job.’39 The editor is still a bastard. He always was a bastard. It is a mistake to look back on the era of the God correspondent and see it as a period of unalloyed gold. All the criticisms made in pub and Bog Bar were always true. But perhaps now the editor is a bigger bastard, and a different sort of bastard, than at any time before.

O I am sitting in the Prime Minister’s press office. There are about half a dozen staff here, mainly well-dressed young women sitting at word processors. They have on disc transcripts of every press conference, every radio interview, and they can call them up to order. It is one of these transcripts I am waiting for. One of the Prime Minister’s media minders has suggested it to me as an example of how the media can get fixated on an issue. On the day in question, he claims, the issue had been something quite different. There had been some-

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thing very important the Prime Minister had been trying to communicate, but the media had not wanted to know. He asks one of the young women to run off a copy of the transcript for me. They begin to hunt for it. While I am waiting, one of the Prime Minister’s media minders tells me that Parliament House is actually not very good for the media. The blue room, where press conferences are normally held, is all wrong. The Minister or Prime Minister is standing up. The journalists are sitting down—too comfortable. ‘We’ve got stuck in there for 55 minutes sometimes, with them just lolling around throwing in questions.’ That is why the Prime Minister’s courtyard—that place of stone and water—is being used more often. But what this minder would really like is a set up like that used by Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett. There the Premier is seated on a dais, and the reporters are in ranks beneath him, like schoolchildren. That works well. The radio in the press room is tuned to John Laws. I am still waiting, taking my chance to have a look around. There are boxes here with prepared biographies of Howard, and all the Howard children. There is a pinboard of good and not-so-good stories. While I am reading them I hear one of the young women making a telephone call to some media monitoring service. She wants a transcript of something on the John Laws show. ‘It was about 20 minutes ago. Something about tax. It was only short, just a throwaway line and a bit more, but we want it. Yes. Thanks.’ The transcript I was waiting for is at last available. It is unremarkable. Paul Kelly has commented that when he was a boy, John Laws was a disc jockey. He played music. Kelly used to listen to him when he did his homework. Now John Laws is the most important political commentator in the country. Meanwhile, Kelly observed, the influence of the newspapers (natural home of the God correspondent) has declined, and in any case they no longer engage regularly with deep policy issues. ‘When have you read something worthwhile about the health system in this country, or about the difficulties in the education system? I believe that the press gallery is a declining force and a declining institution. People may applaud that but the question is what’s substituting for it? Who really cares about the old fashioned political story? What

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happened in Cabinet yesterday? When did you last read what happened in Cabinet yesterday? It rarely happens because of modern media management.’40 We have arrived at the stagey stage. The clouds of political cynicism have thickened, and are approaching fast. The research tells us that journalists are now seen by the public as part of the political elite, no longer separate from them. The research also tells us that people aren’t really interested in politics any more. They don’t want to listen. They don’t want to know. The politicians sing and dance and put on more and more diverting theatre, and the reporters present their antics and try to make them interesting. And so at last, although both sides would deny it, from ‘somewhere out there’—that part of the world that is not Parliament House—politicians and journalists once again appear to be on the same side. ‘We are approaching a crisis in democracy’, one of the ex-Gods tells me in Aussies. ‘And who knows where it will take us.’

O I am sitting in a committee room of Parliament House watching the gallery assemble for a press conference. It is the morning of 26 February 1998, and this is to be a major announcement. Most of the journalists already know what is to be announced, of course. It has to be that way with major announcements. If they didn’t know, they might not bother turning up. The television crews are taking up most of the room with their big crab like tripods, the reporters taking seats with ‘don’t care’ attitudes, or chatting among themselves, laughing. They are here because the Minister for Employment, David Kemp, is to announce the launch of Job Network, a privatised system replacing the old Commonwealth Employment Service with more than three hundred private, community and government organisations which have won tenders for the work. The Minister has yet to appear but his minders

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are here, handing out press kits as thick as my thumb. The lectern is ready, and behind the lectern is the new logo for the scheme. How satisfying it must be to be a graphic designer, I am thinking. Imagine. You are given a brief to design a logo for a new job scheme. There are a thousand messy thoughts, a thousand possibilities. Your sketch pad is full of ridiculous ideas rejected on the pathway to the perfect logo—something that can be used on coffee mugs and letterhead and on banners behind lecterns. Something that is simple yet memorable and that conveys, almost subliminally, the message the commissioning organisation wishes to convey. Finally you have it. The core idea. You play with it a bit, knocking off edges, simplifying it, until it looks so simple, so authoritative that it seems impossible that there ever was at time when this was not the logo. The logo for the Job Network scheme is citrus yellow and magenta, and shows two jigsaw pieces fitted together. Underneath are the words ‘Connecting the Right Person to the Right Job’. Brilliant. It is able to be expanded, as in television advertising, to a larger jigsaw in which individual happy workers find their niches with happy employers. Or it can be reduced to postage stamp size for use on stationery. In a jigsaw, for every piece there is another piece that will match exactly. All the pieces will be used. All the pieces are part of the same picture. All the pieces have their place. If you accept the logo, and with it the jigsaw metaphor, then it becomes almost impossible to think of Job Network as anything but a good thing. I dip into the media kit trying to find within it a chink, a fact, a question from which I would mount my questions to the Minister, were it my job to report this event. The kit is full of facts and figures. It also has smoothly presented arguments in favour of the new scheme, presented in easy question and answer format. Most of the media aren’t even looking at the kit. Michelle is the exception. She is ignoring the small talk all around her, and is crouched over the figures, tutting and nodding her head. And now the Minister is with us. I have heard him compared to a garden gnome, and he is short, and bearded, but he looks too anxious to decorate anyone’s lawn. He has on a yellow tie that nicely echoes the Job Network logo behind him. He gives the prepared speech. The old system hasn’t worked. Too often unemployed people

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have simply been ‘managed’, churned through training schemes with no job at the end. The new arrangements are results driven. Job Network members are to be paid to place unemployed people in jobs. Simple. End of story. Now the reporters ask questions, and they are good questions. Informed questions. Will unemployed people have to pay for the services? Kemp said they will not. Are the old CES staff taking voluntary redundancy? Many will be re-employed by the new service providers, or moved across to Centrelink. Others will take voluntary redundancy. Then Michelle begins. Why, in all this material, has the Government not provided a breakdown of the dollar value of the contracts awarded? The Minister said that information was available. ‘And your people will provide it?’ ‘Yes’, he says, with the cameras rolling in front of him. ‘This afternoon? Because if they don’t there will be tears and gnashing of teeth’, says Michelle. The Minister promises it will be provided, and his media minder, on the sidelines, smiles and nods vigorously. The Minister leaves and now it is the turn of the heads of the organisations who have won the government business. Patrick McClure, chief executive officer of the Sydney City Mission, begins to speak to reporters. One of the cameramen reaches out and pulls him by the forearm. ‘Face the camera please’, said the camera operator. ‘I’m sorry’, says McClure, and begins his spiel again—how happy his organisation is to have the government business, how confident they are of being able to continue helping unemployed people under the new fee-for-service arrangements. Drake International, the largest private organisation to win some of the government business is next, represented by a small neat woman in a check jacket and black skirt. Michelle launches into her. How much was their contract worth? That figure is not available, the woman says. ‘Why not?’ Because it depends on their success rate in placing people in jobs. ‘But you must have some idea of the parameters’, says Michelle.

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‘The figures are not available.’ Michelle snorts. ‘Who says? The Government or you?’ Michelle continues. She won’t let go. It is like a rodeo, with Michelle trying to rope the woman in. She offers high figures, and low figures, and ridicules the woman for apparently not knowing her own business. All this is done in a low tone, without shouting, with just a hint of exasperation. By now the television reporters have gone. Other reporters hang back, swapping glances. Finally, the Drake woman acknowledges that the contract was expected to be worth ‘upwards of $50 million’. Michelle nods quickly, and falls back. Now she is pestering one of the media minders for the breakdown Kemp has promised. ‘You know us, Michelle, we will get you as much as we can as soon as we can.’ ‘Well. You’d better.’ I walk back to my borrowed desk on the second floor of the Senate side of Parliament House, and I am chuckling. I feel proud. The journalists did well. They hadn’t fallen for the professionalism of the release. In fact, it had really made very little difference, all the hoopla, and the logo and the media kit. Yes, it had been stagy—step this way, turn that way, speak to the camera. Yes, only Michelle had been rude and terrier-like. But as a group, they had done their jobs. They had asked the questions that needed asking. I could not think of anything I would have asked that they had missed. Later that morning Mr Kemp and his press secretary visit the second floor of the Senate side of Parliament House. Kemp clearly isn’t a frequent visitor up here. His press minder has to introduce him to the reporters who are writing the story. They are handing out a chart that lists the successful tenderers in order, with a notional dollar figure for their share of the pie. ‘This is the information Michelle was on about’, the minder says, ‘but the figures are theoretical, just based on proportional share of the total. The actual figures will depend on their success’. After saying this, at each reporter’s desk, the minder says ‘Michelle was amazing, wasn’t she?’ He gets different responses. Some reporters shrug. Some just fire back a question. Several smile and say things like ‘It’s a while since she’s been like that’, or ‘Well, that’s Michelle’, or ‘Isn’t she a horror?’ Some reporters, in other words, comply with a view that Michelle’s

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behaviour was aberrant, not reasonable. Some reporters let Michelle down. ‘Ah well, that’s Michelle, God bless her’, said the media minder cheerfully at the desks of these reporters. Kemp smiles uneasily, and they walk on. The day after the launch Michelle Grattan publishes a feature on the scheme describing Job Network as a ‘radical experiment’. She reports divided opinion from the community sector. Mission Australia say the scheme will enable it to help more people. The Australian Catholic Social Welfare Commission said the policy risked the jobless becoming commodities, to be traded at the whim of business enterprises.41 Tom Allard in the Sydney Morning Herald also reports the views of opponents of the scheme, including the ACTU, mourning the end of a tradition of free, public and universally available employment service. He also mentions concerns that some of the companies who had been given tenders are inexperienced. A few weeks later, the story is still pursued by specialist reporters in the capitals, and by some of the more dogged members of the Canberra press gallery. By the end of July the broadsheet newspapers are reporting complaints from providers in the Job Network that they can’t generate the cashflow, and are going broke. In August, Helen Trinca in the Sydney Morning Herald writes ‘Competition has made centres more proactive about finding vacancies, but it has introduced an appalling element into the labour market. We now have some Australians hiding information about jobs from other Australians, and being financially rewarded for their actions’.42 In a triumph of mixed metaphor, Dennis Shanahan writes: ‘The coalition is about to suffer another self-inflicted wound with an all-too-familiar ring to it. Too often policy appears to be carried out for ideological reasons or without due care and attention being paid to the implementation. … Basic requirements of good governance include obligations to those in special need in the community.’43 With Shanahan’s article are the results of a large survey by the Australian which shows that 32 per cent of brokers are in financial trouble. A few weeks later, with the election nearing, the Government

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announces that it is going to give agencies in trouble $55.5 million to help them out. ‘Bail out’ read the headlines. ‘Rescue package’. You’d have to say the gallery did a good job in covering Job Network. They didn’t fall for the glossy media kit or the cosy jigsaw metaphor. From the beginning they were sceptical. But the story, to mix my metaphors Canberra-style, did not grow legs in a vacuum. One of the main people quoted in the critical stories was David Thompson, chief executive of Jobs Australia. I rang him, after the bail-out package, to ask him how he had become a source. Tom Allard of the Sydney Morning Herald was the reporter breaking fresh ground. Allard rang Thompson shortly after Kemp’s launch. Other journalists picked up his name from Allard’s stories, and it became a ‘a toing and froing thing. … I’d ring them when there were new developments, or they’d ring me when they suspected something was up, or had heard something was up’. Generally, the performance of the gallery was good, he says. ‘Those people who did their homework and tracked the story properly, and comprehended a fairly esoteric situation did well. And it was a bizarre situation, because the Minister simply kept denying that there was a problem.’ He lists half a dozen reporters, mainly from broadsheet newspapers and the ABC, who he believes did a good job. Michelle Grattan is on the list. So are some of the reporters who gently mocked her with Kemp and his adviser. The worst coverage, he says, came from non press gallery journalists. One he briefed four times, before telling him to go and do his own homework. The challenge now, he says, is whether the gallery will pick up on the underlying story behind the Minister’s so-called rescue package. The risk is the gallery will see this concession, this ‘defeat’ as the end of the story, when in fact there are deeper issues—more complex issues, that are harder to solve. ‘And of course the real people with cause for complaint are the unemployed, and they don’t have the power to develop contacts with the press gallery or anyone else’, he says.

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O Seven months after the launch of Job Network, Kim Beazley and John Howard face each other in the great election debate. Each has a lectern. Each has a set of practised hand gestures, and a carefully knotted tie. They throw percentage figures at each other on unemployment—8 per cent. Fallen by only 1 per cent. Fallen by only point one of 1 per cent. The thing that is abundantly clear, yet not stated, is that neither can be confident that they will be able to tackle unemployment. The pretty jigsaw-puzzle is a lie. A week later, in a Four Corners program profiling Kim Beazley, his father, himself a politician, asks rhetorically why the Government can’t simply spend a billion or two on public works to create jobs. He says he knows his son opposes this sort of stuff, but sees no good reason why he can’t shift from economic rationalism back to active government. And in the final days of the election, Beazley seemed to follow his dad’s advice, and pledges an attempt to get unemployment down to 5 per cent, including big Government spending.

O In the dying days of the free market period of the gallery, the end of the alleged Golden Era of the God Correspondent, one leading member of the intellectual community in Canberra was Ken Davidson, who wrote for the Age. He eschewed economic rationalism. He was known to favour big Government, and social welfare. In the mid 1980s a friend of mine went to work in the Canberra press gallery when she was in her early twenties. She didn’t stay long, and she didn’t like it much. She came back to Melbourne now and then, with tales of the social life: the weekend the gallery went feral, who slept with whom, and what everyone said about it. This was the middle of my supposedly principled stand against going to Canberra, and so I charged her with all the conventional criticisms. Somewhere in all this Ken Davidson’s name came up.

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‘Yes, well he isn’t so well regarded now. Apparently he sticks to some economic theory—is it Keynes? Well, that’s thought to be pretty old fashioned now.’ Even then, when I was only two years older and really no more economically literate than her, it horrified me that she was writing stories out of Canberra, adding to the culture there, and had never heard of Keynes, except to be told that he was out of fashion. In his landmark book The End of Certainty, Paul Kelly described the story of the 1980s, as being about ‘the embrace by both sides of politics … of the free market agenda and its gradual application as the solution to Australia’s underlying problems. … In the 1980s both Labor and non-Labor underwent internal philosophical revolutions to support a new set of ideas—faith in markets, deregulation, a reduced role for government, low protection and the creation of a new cooperative enterprise culture.’ The question for the 1990s, Kelly said, was whether this new philosophy thrived. The challenge for Australian leadership was to internationalise the economy within a framework of social justice and equity—or would the shadow and lack of confidence caused by recession and unemployment lead us into confusion about our national direction?44 When I gave my talk at the seminar with Dennis Shanahan, we were asked whether the gallery was still predominately economic rationalist, or not. Dennis Shanahan said he thought it was, with some alternative points of view coming from Geoffrey Barker, Margo Kingston, and others. He also thought it was predominantly left of centre. I said that I didn’t know, because I had never heard the gallery members debate politics from a policy point of view. The Young and the Restless rarely talked politics, other than to discuss what was a good yarn, and what was not. The heavy-hitters talked mainly about the game of politics. Who was up, and who was down. Who was a star performer. Who was weak. Or at least, that is all they talked about when I was in earshot. The gallery leaders, including the ex-Gods, presumably do talk policy politics, and some of them, like Kelly, publish extensively. But this debate didn’t seem to touch the gallery in its day-to-day operations, and of course, the ex-Gods don’t get much space these days. Michelle Grattan has said that in an era where no-one talks pol-

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icy, and lifestyle journalism proliferates, newspapers tend to look ahead and seem unsure as to whether to ‘adopt a knocking persona in an attempt to grab readers, or a “civic” one, to identify with them’. ‘The knocking mode goes for broke on stories that show Government and other institutions are exploiting society, full of scandals, even bright clouds have black linings … the other contradictory face of today’s journalist feels the need to link the newspaper to its market by shared good works, which can include the practice of democracy.’45 The press gallery did a good job on Job Network. But it was knocking journalism pure and simple. Was civic journalism possible? I doubt that the unemployed people on Northbourne Avenue offering to wash the windscreens of those stopped at traffic lights were interviewed, although they probably have cleared the vision of many a journalist. Were there other ways to connect with the reality of unemployment—the fear in the stomach of the insecure? The pain in the hearts of the unwanted? Probably. But the journalists in the Canberra press gallery might say that this is not part of their job. This is for the feature writers in the other capitals. You know how it would be done. A case study or two to give the facts and figures a human face. A more or less competently written thousand words or two. All this has been done, and will be done again, and yet somehow its very predictability undermines its message. Are there no new ways? Is there no journalism that leaves you breathless with its impact, surprised, delighted, your view of the world altered? And are ‘ knocking’ and ‘civic’ the only two options? Are ‘belligerent’ and ‘cozy’ the only two ways for a reporter to be, or can we look for something else?

4 Seeing I was told I must go to Manuka while Parliament is sitting, because that is where the social life happens. The Grange Hotel, particularly, is meant to be the scene of many affections and defections, although Laura Tingle says she hasn’t been there for a long time. It’s more for the young people, she says. ‘The young reporters and the young staffers go there, and I guess it is useful if you are new, to develop contacts, and hear what is going on, but I think you’d only get lowlevel gossip there. The senior people have a different scene.’ This different scene incorporates the restaurants of Manuka and other inner suburbs of Canberra. Everyone agrees that The Ottoman is important. ‘It’s worth keeping your eyes open. Looking at who is lunching with who’, I am told. This was the first time I had ever heard of The Ottoman, but it was shortly to become the centre of a mini-career storm for a friend of mine. I met Catriona Jackson a few years ago, when she was a novice journalist working out of the Eureka Street offices in Richmond, Melbourne. Since then she had graduated to a job at the Canberra Times. Among other things she had become their restaurant reviewer. In the recent past the restaurant reviews had been almost universally favourable. To knock a Canberra restaurant was to knock Canberra, and there is nothing Canberrans hate more. Then new, more critical reviewers were hired. Catriona is from Melbourne—in itself a sin. She brought a critical edge to the job. In spite of being very thin, Catriona has always been a ‘foody’. Years ago I ate simple pasta with beans and bacon in her one-bedroom flat in Flemington. It was so delicious it was hard to stop. When I worked with her briefly at Eureka Street, she put me on to the roast pork rolls sold by the Vietnamese café on the corner. I can still remember her sharp nod of the head as I bought one, her long blonde hair swinging. ‘It’s just a nice amount of lunch’, she said approvingly. I liked Catriona. I liked her matter of factness, and her sharp

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face and kind eyes. She had a no-bullshit attitude, and she had great courage in facing that thing that all reporters suffer from but most rush to disguise—shyness. Catriona is one of the least pretentious people I know. It was always going to be interesting to see how she got on in Canberra. Early in her restaurant-reviewing career she began to get letters from readers complaining that she was guilty of Canberra-bashing. ‘I made the mistake’, she says ‘of admitting in print that I haven’t always lived in Canberra. Never, never do that in this town.’ But the complaints reached a crescendo in May. Catriona’s sister was visiting Canberra and the two women and their father went to eat at, and review, The Ottoman. The review was quite mild. The brains, Catriona said, were of good texture and with a light batter, but perhaps a little tasteless. The duck tasted good, but was a little dry. The veal was good, but needed something more—perhaps some potatoes, carefully cooked. The décor was good, but it was hard to have a conversation in a normal speaking voice. Catriona concluded: ‘Canberrans have a soft spot for Ottoman Cuisine, partly because it has a history. … The food at Ottoman Cuisine is mostly good, occasionally spectacular, but sometimes pedestrian, given the prices’. The cost of dining there, she said, was about $120 for two, including a bottle of wine.46 The response was instant, and furious. The chef rang several times and threatened legal action. Ottoman customers were mobilised. Letters to the editor were written. Powerful executives within the newspaper were lobbied. For a week or two, the Canberra Times, and Catriona in particular, seemed to be under fire from most of the people who mattered in Canberra. ‘I knew the Ottoman was hallowed turf ’, Catriona told me. ‘I found after it was published just how important it is. It is the restaurant for the ALP, apparently.’ One of the critical letters came from Patrick Troy, AO, a Professor of Urban Research in the Research School of Social Sciences at ANU and a man with close Labor connections—a sometime adviser to Government on planning matters. He wrote accusing Catriona of ‘gratuitous criticism’, and of chauvinism for her passing remark—that innovation was unusual in a Turkish restaurant. She was ill-informed, Troy said. He also said she was pretentious.

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Another reader wrote that Catriona should have got the restaurant to suggest the menu, and made sure it included fish and seafood. ‘Without detracting from his other achievements the thing (Chef ) Serif Kaya deserves Canberrans’ gratitude for is introducing the novel concept to Canberra restaurants of fresh fish and seafood.’ For more than a week this controversy swelled the letters and opinion pages of the Canberra Times. It was Catriona Jackson’s blooding as a journalist. Now she has moved on and become the health reporter for the Canberra Times. She wrote to me recently about her new job. ‘The policy stuff is very interesting’, she said. ‘The real debate is going on outside Government—I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. The part of the round I’m really enjoying, somewhat to my surprise, is the people stories. There are a lot of people who are showing extraordinary dignity and patience in the face of a health care system that is really NOT good enough in many cases.’ I think Catriona is a good journalist, getting better. The story of Catriona and The Ottoman is a parable of journalism. Telling it as you see it. Not being impressed with logos and reputation. Having courage in the face of criticism. Not being too cozy, or too comfortable. And having self-doubt about all of the above. I wonder if Catriona will ever make the Canberra press gallery, and if she does what she will make of it?

O I went to Manuka. It was the night that the Wik legislation went before the Senate for the second time. It was the day before the High Court handed down its decision on whether the Government could pass racist laws. It was a fine and cool night. The taxi dropped me off outside the Grange Hotel. The dark and silky quiet of well-off suburbia was only a few hundred metres away in either direction, but here the street was lit up, the cafes had tables on the footpath and piped music came out of every little eatery. Men in baggy courseweave pants and black skivvies and women in little black dresses

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wandered along the sidewalk. The restaurants were all full. The Ottoman wasn’t hard to find. It was on the corner, and had big windows almost to ground level so that it wasn’t hard to take the advice—watch who is dining with whom—without having to check out the accuracy of Catriona’s price estimates. Even standing across the street I could see half a dozen faces I recognised, and other faces that I felt I ought to recognise, because they had that look of the halfway famous. They sat there talking, forks in hand, some in suits, some in casual clothes. Was it here, I wondered, that the serious matters of policy were being discussed and decided? Was this the intellectual life, the community, that the God correspondents missed being part of? Or were the people at those tables talking about the food, or the wine, or how grateful, how very very grateful, Canberrans should be for the novelty of fresh fish and seafood. Or how important it was not to be chauvinistic about Turks, and others. On the street outside, two BMWs were double-parked. There was something in the lights, or the tinting of the glass, at The Ottoman that bathed those inside in golden glow. I stood, not quite with my nose against the glass, but almost. The people on the inside seemed quite comfortable with being looked at. They seemed to expect it. You would not dine at The Ottoman if you were being illicit, or talking to people you should not talk to. It is a place of comfortable power and overt relationships. People are proud to be customers of The Ottoman, and standing outside it was easy to see why. Lit up like that—illuminating and decorating the street. It made quite a show. It made you want to be inside. And it made you aware that you were not. I turned my back and walked across the road to The Grange, which was quiet, the bar staff almost leaping over the counter in their eagerness to serve me a drink. A man and a woman, still in workday clothes, were sitting in a booth. He was a reporter. She was a junior political staffer. They had a bottle of wine, empty, between them and were leaning towards each other in the manner of people who are not yet lovers, but about to become so—every touch or lack of touch significant, every phrase loaded. At the bar sat another couple. He was on the mobile phone for almost an hour. She played with her straw, occasionally using it to pick her teeth. ‘Tell me mate’, he said into his mobile ‘Is it a

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marginal seat? If it is, no worries. … ’ He saw me, and looked at me suspiciously. In a coffee shop across the way, an MP was dining with a woman. It emerged, as I eavesdropped, that she is divorced with children, and he is single with a big house. ‘Ah but at least your place is home’, he said. ‘You say you’ve forgotten what it’s like to be alone, but at least you don’t go home to an empty house.’ The coffee was good. The food was good. The company was apparently good. I wandered around, but this was like the parliamentary chamber—a sealed community, on display. A perfect egg yolk, sealed and tight, suspended in the Canberra night air. I caught a taxi on the rank opposite the Grange to go back to my hotel. We whipped up to Capital Hill, where Parliament House was floodlit. On the plaza at the front, a Japanese man in a suit was standing in front of a television camera, talking earnestly. Why was he there? What were they making? A company video? An advertisement? A documentary? Then as we turned north towards the heart of the continent and the centre of the city, the taxi driver said to me gruffly ‘Have you heard the good news?’ Thinking he must be talking about Wik, I turned towards him hoping for information, but he was offering me a booklet about the Baha’i faith. My instinct was to reject it, but I stopped myself. After all, it was only a short journey to my hotel. In the next few minutes, he showed me several of the volumes of Baha’i literature he carried with him, and told me how the great prophet early this century got the leaders of the world’s nations together to encourage cooperation. But they didn’t listen. ‘Unfortunately that is why World War One happened, and World War Two.’ He shrugged. ‘But at least we have the United Nations.’ How long had he been sitting on that rank, I wondered, watching them walk past? Watching the people sitting in the golden glow, being grateful for fresh seafood, and not being chauvinistic. No, not at all. How long had he been watching the people who know the corridors of power, the people who analyse the texts, and who write the texts, and who gain or lose or regain their jobs on the texts? How long had he been sitting there, with his taxi full of faith, thinking about the reasons things happen, and a lonely prophet who

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wasn’t listened to, and how that has made all the difference. But at least we have the United Nations.

O The morning after my visit to Manuka my family and I left Canberra. We drove out early in the morning, so we would have time to stop when necessary to let the children run and play. It was a sunny day but as we drove east, back through that buggered-up sheep country, we heard on the radio that the forecast was for sleet and rain. We were trying to get home before it arrived. Winter was coming, I thought. And as the day wore on, the sky turned grey. The Hume Highway was like a slate ribbon running through paddocks washed in weak sunlight. I was thinking, of course, about Canberra. Margo Kingston had said to me: ‘We’re on the cusp of a redefinition of the nation. Either we will develop as a progressive nation, or we’ll fall back into being a backwater’. She said this, I thought, in partial justification for why she wants to be a player as well as a reporter. She, at least, has little doubt about which direction is which. But how are we to know what direction to take, how to redefine ourselves, and whether, in the end, we have succeeded? Only through those who tell our stories, and partly through those people on the second floor of the Senate side of Parliament House, and the words they put to air and to press. The press gallery aren’t bad people. Most of the gallery members were helpful to me, and so engagingly incautious when I interviewed them. It was a proof of that miracle of journalism—that if you ask questions, people tend to answer them. Even when the gallery ran as a pack, it was hard to really hate them. It was not a pack of rabid, slavering wolves, but more a pack of over-excited puppy dogs, twisting and turning, chasing each other and their own tails, all afire with the excitement of the moment, with the thrill of being allowed out on a really good run. And I felt that thrill too. I felt the thrill of the wind and the air on my face, and the thrill of the certain conviction that the quarry was worthwhile and legitimate. For all my criticisms,

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I had enjoyed being among journalists again. I remembered the excitement of being in the know, of writing with the sure and certain knowledge that one would be read, if only by one’s colleagues. I missed these things. And I thought about not writing this piece. I had heard once again the siren call of journalism, and I knew that by writing this essay, I was quite possibly binding myself to the mast. But on that journey back home against the darkening sky I gradually emerged from these imaginings—not into a real world, because the McDonalds we stopped at, with their plastic playgrounds and give-away animals and large fluorescent clowns were hardly that, but into a different world. McDonalds are good for parents. Not only do they have nappy change areas, but they also serve reasonable coffee and edible chips. The McDonalds on the Hume are built on hills, so they can be seen for miles up and down the highway. From the plastic playgrounds where Clare gurgled, slid, and tried to climb things too big for her and jump from places too high, I could see great vistas of country marred by the acne scars of salinity. There were houses out there, and farm buildings and fences and sheep and cows, all visible from the McDonalds’ eyries, yet otherwise unobserved. Closer by at the tables around us were people in ill-fitting tracksuits buying mass produced food, and talking about families, jobs, and cars and in one case, the arrangements for custody of children from a marriage breakdown. Ottoman too far away. There were young people with pimples, adults with weight problems. Lots and lots of ugly people. They looked different, were different, from the people in the world I had been visiting. None of them were talking politics. And in another sense, all of them were talking politics. We got in the car and drove some more. Lachlan and Clare slept and woke, and cried, and ate, growing older every second. What side of the divide will they end up on, I thought. Will they be on the outside, sitting in the dark like that taxi driver, and turning to the tales of prophets and journalists, or will they be the ones on the inside, amid the light and the chatter, confident that they know, if not the answers, then at least where the answers are to be had. We are facing an approaching crisis in democracy, the God cor-

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respondent had said. If they were in the dark, my babies, how would they find out what was going on? Would they even want to know?

O We got home before the sleet, and it was in fact a mild winter. In spring, after weeks of prophecy and warning from the Canberra press gallery, an election was called and the campaign began. By now I was remote from the gallery and I watched them on television like everyone else. The day after Kim Beazley’s policy speech I was sitting at Kate Cole-Adams’ kitchen table. Our children were playing with each other, which meant that occasionally we got more than a minute of unbroken conversation together. I asked her what she thought of the campaign. She said, as she filled a spouted cup with diluted apple juice for her son, that she found it fascinating. ‘Why?’ ‘Because it’s so hard to read. So hard to predict. And because Labor actually has a chance.’ What did you think of Beazley’s policy speech?’ I asked. ‘Fine, but I find all that harrumphing and trumpet blowing a bit unimpressive’, she said, and the conversation broke off, because Clare had just pinched Finn’s favourite toy. I had listened to Beazley and been cynical too, and yet there had been phrases that had got me in—like the bit where he talked about your child being sick in the night and needing a good hospital. I had wanted to get up and check my babies, but had smothered the impulse. I was a journalist, after all. Trained to be sceptical. I dropped back into theatre-reviewing mode, and thought that Beazley was actually doing quite well. Kate and I came back to the kitchen table, and this time we talked about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Kate grabbed a copy of that day’s Sydney Morning Herald and began to read me an

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account of Lewinsky’s evidence before the grand jury. ‘It’s amazing’, she said. ‘It was like Oprah Winfrey or something.’ ‘As Ms Lewinsky explained her affair with President Bill Clinton, grand jurors offered the former White House intern advice on how to get over her hate for Ms Linda Tripp, the friend who betrayed her, and move on with her life. ‘We wanted to offer you a bouquet of good wishes that includes luck, success, happiness and blessings’, the grand jury forewoman told Ms Lewinsky as she concluded her testimony on August 20. The jurors’ concern for Ms Lewinsky was most evident when she broke down in tears on that day, saying ‘I’m really sorry for everything that happened’, then adding: ‘And I hate Linda Tripp.’ Ms Tripp, a friend and co-worker, secretly recorded 20 hours of tapes of conversations with Ms Lewinsky and turned them over to the White House prosecutor Mr Kenneth Starr, sparking the investigation which made Ms Lewinsky a household name and now threatens Mr Clinton’s presidency. ‘Can I just say—I mean, I think I should seize this opportunity now—that we’ve all fallen short. We sin every day’, a juror told Ms Lewinsky after her tearful apology. ‘I don’t care whether it’s murder, whether it’s affairs or whatever. And we get over that. You ask forgiveness and you go on. ‘So to let you know from here, you have my forgiveness. Because we all fall short.’ The transcript was among 2,800 pages of documents given to the US Congress by Mr Starr and released by the House of Representatives judiciary committee, which will decide whether to launch an impeachment inquiry against Mr Clinton. The transcript shows Ms Lewinsky’s expression of hatred for Ms Tripp started a strong exchange. One juror advised Ms Lewinsky: ‘Even though right now you feel a lot of hate for Linda Tripp, you need to move on and leave her where she is, because whatever goes around comes around.’ A juror: ‘It comes around.’ A juror: ‘It does.’ A juror: ‘And she is definitely going to have to give an account for what she did, so you need to just go past her and don’t keep her because that’s going to keep you out.’ A juror: ‘That’s right.’ A juror: ‘And going to keep you from moving on.’ A juror: ‘Allowing you to move on.’ Unlike her initial testimony on August 6, when almost all the questions were put by lawyers, the jurors became active and conducted a large portion of the questioning during her second appearance on August 20. At one point, Ms Lewinsky asked if the grand jurors could call her Monica instead of Ms Lewinsky.

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Fit to Print ‘If you say so’, replied the jury forewoman. Ms Lewinsky: ‘I’m just 25. Please.’ After she testified about her disappointment that Mr Clinton had not acknowledged her during his August 17 speech to the nation, and about the ordeal endured by her family, a juror offered support. ‘Monica, none of us in this room are perfect’, the juror told her. ‘We all fall and we fall several times a day. The only difference between my age and when I was your age is now I get up faster.’47

Kate tossed the paper aside with a snort. ‘I think that’s rather wonderful’, I said. ‘What!’ ‘I mean who are the grand jury anyway? They’re just folks. I think it’s rather good they responded to her on such a human level. Better than just cross examining her on whether or not he put his dick in her mouth.’ Kate considered. ‘But it’s not real’, she said. ‘They believe their own drama. They’ve become who they’re pretending to be. Oprah.’ ‘The personal is political, but the political can also be personal’, I said, rather pleased with myself for being able to think of something so snappy, and I was about to go further and talk to her about Nick Sherry and the AAP reporter, but the conversation lapsed because we were both needed to sort out a tangle of limbs and tears on the living room floor. But I think Kate was probably right and I was wrong about Lewinsky, and about Beazley. Sincerity is, after all, the easiest role to play, and the most available vocabulary. We even fool ourselves, and so become true believers.

O During the election campaign, I was reading a book called Vital Lies, Simple Truths—the Psychology of Self-Deception by Daniel Goleman, who is a former visiting professor at Harvard University, and an editor of the magazine Psychology Today.48 The book says many uncomfortable things, but the central idea is that we see and notice and give credit to the things we are accustomed to seeing and to the things that we want to see, or that already

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fit in with our world view. We fail to see those things that we do not expect. Even if we do see them, we dismiss them. Thus we believe our parents love us, even when there is evidence to the contrary. We believe our families were good for us, even when in some ways they weren’t. Thus the alcoholic is able to deny his problem and the wife of the alcoholic is also able not to see her true situation. I also read a feature article in the Weekend Australian colour magazine, which purported to tackle the topic of why we don’t trust our politicians. It was written by Roy Eccleston, who I met in my first week as a cadet at the Age. He was covering the police, and showed us around the one-room, tobacco-stained office the Age maintained next to the old Russell Street police headquarters. Roy must have been very young then. The Age was a political newspaper. It didn’t cover police news much, and there were rarely more than two people in the police rounds office. The Sun, on the other hand, had an enormous police rounds staff. For the Sun, police rounds was what Canberra was to the Age. So even though Roy Eccleston had the title chief police reporter, his job was still fairly junior. But he impressed us cadets. Our job was to sit with him in the little office and ring around the country police stations several times a day, introduce ourselves politely and ask whether anything newsworthy was happening. Nothing ever was— or if it was, (flood, fire, drought) we already knew about it. Meanwhile, Roy would listen to the police radio on the scanner, and occasionally go out in the car to the scene of accidents and crimes. On Saturdays, it was the job of the cadets to keep an ear on that police scanner. They talked in code on police radio. Different kinds of incidents had different numbers. I can’t remember the numbers, but a list of them and their meaning was hung above the scanner. I remember murders—46 I think it was—were ringed in red. Domestics were common, but beneath notice. Thus the schema for news were set. Now Eccleston is a feature writer, dealing with more contemplative material. In the article I read during the election campaign he quoted psychologists who compared our attitude to politicians with the attitude of children from dysfunctional families to their parents. If trust is continually betrayed, it is difficult or impossible for children to begin to trust again.49

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I doubted very much whether people really saw politicians as parent figures. I agreed with Laura Tingle, who had said, when she told me that the God-correspondent was now dead, that people no longer like to be told what to think by journalists, politicians or anyone else. Only days before Eccleston’s article was published, Pauline Hanson had been ridiculed by the media for claiming to feel like the mother of the nation. Howard, of course, was asked to respond. He had his lines ready. He said he was proud to be the father of his children, but so far as the Australian people were concerned, he was their servant. I imagined Tony O’Leary cooking that one up. According to Vital Lies, Simple Truths, the likely response of children to unreliable parents is not only to distrust the parents, but to set up a schema that says that the world is unreliable, and thenceforth to notice and give credit only to those things that confirm that world view. In Vital Lies, Simple Truths, there is a chapter called ‘The Detective’, which begins with a description of Sherlock Holmes, and his belief that ‘The little things are infinitely the most important’. ‘Holmes represents the Detective at his best’, writes Goleman. ‘What sets him apart as exemplary for this type is his awareness of the dangers of bias. ‘I make a point’, Holmes once said ‘of never having any prejudices and of following docilely wherever fact may lead me’. But, Goleman says, Holmes is in fact very selective in what he notices, and in what facts he takes into account. What Holmes claims as pure deduction most often comprises giant leaps of faith and guesswork. ‘The weakness of the Detective is also his strength. When the Detective is at his most acute, he is searching for something—to confirm a preconceived idea of what is there. … He looks so keenly that he does not quite see; he hears so astutely that he fails to listen. In other words, his deficit is not in his attentional powers, which are often brilliantly attuned. His attention is off because it is guided by a lack of interest in the obvious. … He listens and looks not to gather what is apparent, but what it signifies.’ I thought the description of the Detective would have served well as a description of a heavy-hitter Canberra press gallery journalist.

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To demonstrate how adept we are at choosing what to notice, Daniel Goleman suggests that while focusing on the printed page of his book, the reader allow their attention to drift from the print, to the white margins around it, and from there to the room that surrounds the book. I did this exercise at night, in my bedroom, a few minutes before sleep. The book was a noisy place to be, the text full of uncomfortable ideas and challenging notions. But the margins were blank, and my bedroom was quiet and dark, the next day’s clothes dim shapes on their hanger against the wall, and Lachlan’s breathing in the cot by my side a sigh, broken only by the occasional fart or whinny. As I watched the election campaign in the next few weeks, I found my attention wandering from the men and women in the centre of the picture—Howard shaking hands, Hanson in her tight little suits, Beazley cuddling babies—to the margins where the reporters stood. I caught sight of Michelle’s wiry hair, and the young radio reporters catching each other’s eyes as they held tape recorders to the talking mouths. I saw Margo Kingston, still chewing those nicorettes, as she followed Pauline Hanson around. I saw her at a One Nation press conference standing up and shouting at David Oldfield that he never held a press conference that he didn’t walk out of. ‘Why won’t you answer questions Mr Oldfield. Why don’t you have the guts to answer questions?’ Margo’s outburst made all the television news’s that night. Later, when people talked about the media falling out with the Hanson camp, they usually meant Margo. And yet it was clear from what she wrote that she had in a weird way come to quite like Pauline Hanson, if not Oldfield. Margo was being unmanageable again, God bless her. I thought I caught a glimpse of the steel-grey hair of Dennis Shanahan, just on the edge of the screen, while his hand and tape recorder came forward to centre stage. I saw Tony O’Leary, still looking like a plain-clothes cop, standing at Howard’s elbow and pouting. I didn’t see Laura Tingle. I heard that she was heavy with child, but was managing the campaign coverage from the Sydney Morning Herald bureau—reading all the transcripts, doing all the textual analysis, and alerting people to possible stories. And what were they covering, these journalists? What was in the centre of the page? Mostly, theatre. And because of the pressures of

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television, they were mostly matinee performances, designed to catch the six o’clock news. The theatre had gone on tour. The reviewers were still reviewing—noting good performances and gaffes. The difference was, this show had a reality check at the end of it. I read the newspapers, including the newspapers I used to work for, and thought about how hard they would all be working. I know how it is. One time in Queensland, when the Fitzgerald Inquiry was in full swing and the Bjelke Petersen Government on the skids, I was writing an average of a thousand words a day between the closing of the courts and the front-page deadline. I was so busy that I hired somebody to buy my groceries, feed my cat, clean my house and do my washing. That’s how it would be on the campaign trail. No time to live, little time to think, until the deadline passed and they could relax. At this point, the journalists would lift their heads and look at where they happened to be, and try to think of where to go to unwind, and have some fun. Laura Tingle had talked to me about the campaign trail. ‘You get very close to your colleagues in a funny sort of way. They have seen you at your best, and at your very very worst.’ I was glad to be out of it. So glad to be out of it. And yet I searched the margins of the television screen and part of me longed for a world beyond the printed page as busy as the one within it In the next chapter of his book on lies and truth, Goleman describes the sorts of dances between parent and child that can result in Detective-driven paranoia. He describes a case study involving child called Jenny, whose mother is animated, needing a high level of excitement. Whenever mother and child’s eyes meet, the mother goes into high gear, making faces and boisterous baby talk. It is too much for Jenny. She looks away. The mother then ups the level of her assault, swinging around to meet Jenny’s averted face head on, and beginning another barrage. The baby buries its head in the pillow. The mother comes closer, louder, and adds tickling. Jenny closes her eyes. The mother picks her up and holds her face to face. Jenny looks, but buries her face in the pillow as soon as she is put down. The mother gets visibly frustrated, angry and confused. It ends with Jenny, crying, and being put to bed. The psychologist who made these observations became so concerned for Jenny’s health that he made a home visit some time later,

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to find that mother and child had come to an accommodation. They had each given up a little on the other. The mother was less dogged in her pursuit of Jenny’s attention. Jenny seemed better able to take her mother’s antics. They had developed coping mechanisms. I fancied I saw, during the election campaign, the beginnings of a half-embarrassed awareness among the journalists that the electorate, the viewers, are not pleased—that what they are doing was in some way not enough, or too much, or not right. Every night on the 7.30 Report Kerry O’Brien almost apologised for the election coverage, giving a countdown of the days left with a wry smile, before devoting most of the show to that day’s matinees. Towards the end of the campaign, O’Brien had a panel session, including ex-God correspondents Michelle Grattan, Alan Ramsey and Paul Kelly, and asked them about the campaign. They all said that one of the most notable things was that the electorate was not paying attention. The electorate was ‘sleeping’. In the Australian Nicholas Rothwell wrote: ‘Indeed at times it has seemed as though the official election, all whistle-stop tours and staged events for television, has been happening in another, electronic country while, on the ground, everyday Australians watched, bemused, cold-eyed, indifferent’. On the Wednesday before the election campaign, Dennis Shanahan wrote that the polls showed ‘voters are resisting the central policies of both the major parties. He said that the poll results had been the only real stories in the campaign. In spite of all the space and time devoted to the theatre, nobody had said anything unexpected. Paul Kelly wrote that one of the people taking the polls, Sol Lebovic, described the situation as a ‘stalemate’. ‘After nearly a month, the voters haven’t moved one way or another. They refuse to endorse John Howard or Beazley. Unless sentiment changes, the winner will merely fall over the line. It is a recipe for weak government.’ In all this commentary the electorate was described as though it were a different group from the viewers and the readers, who were invited to join the insider’s concerns at the apathy of that great ‘other’: the voters. And so they continued, the politicians, giggling and gooing at us, tickling us, picking us up, demanding that we pay attention. And

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the gallery helped them with this. The gallery was on the same side as the politicians. They wanted us to pay attention. And we buried our heads in the pillow, and wished for quiet. And gradually, I think, we are developing coping mechanisms. We are giving up a little on them, and they are giving up a little on us. Or perhaps we give up a lot. I am worried about this great tide of political cynicism. For how can we believe, and vote—how can we even allow ourselves to be informed, if we will not care? If we give up? If they give up on us? The reporting from Canberra seems to me to be mainly tedious, with a dangerous, weird, hyped-up sort of dullness. It is scary when you think about it. Even the best journalists seem to be at a loss to overcome predictability. People aren’t listening, and all the analysis, all the Canberra-speak and the effort, all the journalists’ search for the underlying meaning leads, paradoxically, to a lack of meaning. In Goleman’s terms, this is the legacy of the Detective. The attention that leads to inattention. The adherence to schema. The penetrating eye, that cannot always see. New things need to be tried, and I am sure there are more new things possible than I can think of or predict. But one of the new things might be to experiment with the form of reporting, which remains tied to very old fashioned ideas about how people read, and how people think, as well as to old technology, when printing newspapers was a matter of hot metal and hot ink. Another thing might be to explicitly acknowledge subjectivity, rather than claiming one is objective simply because one has quoted two people from opposite sides saying exactly what everyone expects them to say. Another thing would be to strive for that innocent eye. To say what happened, and not always try to say what it meant. Trying new things would of course be perilous. Not everything would succeed. Important stories, or what editors and peers have long regarded as important stories, would be missed. If one talks to bureaucrats rather than to politicians and their minders, then the politics-as-sport kind of story will be missed—who is up and who is down, who is performing well and who is about to be dropped from the team. It is much easier to contemplate missing these sorts of sto-

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ries in the abstract than it is in reality, when every news service except yours has led with a threat to a cabinet minister, and you have missed it, and your editor wants to know why and your colleagues are laughing up their sleeves. There is also the risk—the certainty—when trying something new, of self-indulgence, error and embarrassment. There is the risk of accusations of ethical breach. The pressures to conform are very strong. Professional and political scorn will be heaped upon anyone who tries to do it differently. And yet it seems to me that there is a strong and urgent need for a reinvention of political journalism. The best of the generation that preceded mine is nearing retirement, and so far, for all the imperfections of the God correspondents, nobody even pretends that there has been anything to beat them. The times have changed, of course. There is no point in trying to go back to the alleged Golden Era. Perhaps the times are tougher, but it has always been a tough game. How golden was the Golden Era in fact? I think now it is clear that its major flaw was the very fact that the flowering was brief and unsustained. The God correspondents were not good teachers, nor good developers of talent. As bureau chiefs and columnists, they dominated everything, and still do, to a lesser extent. Not much grew in their shadow. We can see that now, when they are aging but there clearly is no-one as fresh and vigorous as they once were to take their places. This is not only a fault of individuals. There is something in the culture of the profession—its immediacy, its macho priorities, its short attention span, its paradoxically uniform concentration on the cult of the individual—that acts against the education and inspiration of those who are making their way up. All the things that make journalism exciting and worthwhile can also, if left to play themselves out for long enough, make it dull. If political reporting is to be revived, it will be partly because of a victory over the barren legacy of today’s journalistic culture.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

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‘Kernot’s Secret Past’ by Daniel Dasey, Liz Hannan and Fia Cumming, Sun-Herald, 14 December 1997. ‘Reading between the Lib Lines’ by Margo Kingston, the Sydney Morning Herald, 10 March 1996. ‘$1.25bn Environment Fund: Coalition Rolls Out the Green Barrel’ by Stephen Lunn, the Australian, 16 February 1998. ‘Alexander Downer and the Case of the Smoking Cigar’ by Lindsay Murdoch, the Age, 11 September 1997. The Sydney Morning Herald reported the Minister for Education’s attack on 16 September 1998, a few days before Hewett’s stories were published. ‘How the Marshall Island’s Connection was Forged’, the Age, 8 May 1992; ‘More Revealed on Symons’, the Age, 16 May 1992; ‘Richardson’s Visa Role Under Probe’, the Age, 22 May 1992; and others all by Margo Kingston. ‘The Other Side of Saint Cheryl’ by Paul McGeough, the Sydney Morning Herald, 13 December 1997. ‘Downer’s Holiday Ruined by a Noisy Party’ by Margo Kingston, the Sydney Morning Herald, 11 January 1995. This result was gleaned from a survey conducted by the University of Queensland’s Department of Journalism in 1994. One hundred and seventy-three journalists drawn at random from mainstream news media were interviewed. Of these 40 per cent nominated the Australian as the best newspaper in the country. The next most popular newspaper was the Sydney Morning Herald (25 per cent) and the Age (16 per cent). In a survey two years before, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age had come first, with the Australian a poor third. In the intervening period, Paul Kelly became editor of the Australian. Civilising Global Capital by Mark Latham, Allen & Unwin, 1998. ‘The Modernising Voice Labor Should Heed’ by Paul Kelly, the Australian, 1 April 1998. Eureka Street, June 1998. The Reading Group, Pan, 1998 and The Morality of Gentlemen, Pan, 1984, both by Amanda Lohrey. This is a paraphrase. The full section states that publication of private facts should be regarded as being on a topic of public interest and defensible if action was brought under proposed privacy legislation if it:

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Fit to Print a. related to the public, commercial or professional activities of a person; b. related to the suitability or candidature for public, commercial or professional office; c. was or were relevant to a decision taken, or then likely to be taken, on a public, commercial or professional question by any person who occupied, or was a candidate for election or appointment to, an office; d. related to any property or services offered to the public; e. was or were facts, the publication of which were necessary or desireable for: i. the apprehension of an offender; ii. the enforcement of the law; iii. the protection of public health; iv.discussion on a matter relating to public administration or the administration of justice; or f. was or were otherwise of legitimate concern to the general public or to any section of the public Australian Law Reform Commission Report, No. 11, ‘Unfair Publication: Defamation and Privacy’. The recommended new code and other quotes from the review committee are taken from the Media, Entertainment and Art Alliance Ethics Review Committee’s final report dated December 1996. Since the report was released, a working party has further reviewed the code and made some amendments to the recommended code reproduced here. The clause on privacy has been changed to eliminate the reference to public figures and now reads: ‘Respect private grief and personal privacy. Journalists have the right to resist compulsion to intrude’. Kingston broke the story in an article titled ‘Jubilant Crichton-Browne Talks of Execution’ in the Sydney Morning Herald, 1 August 1995. Egan wrote about the conversation in ‘My Run-in with the Sexist Senato’, the Australian, 2 August 1995. This account is taken from The End of Certainty by Paul Kelly, Allen & Unwin, 1992. The book includes a much fuller account of the speech than I have given here. ‘I have been to the Edge of Life and Come Back’ by Nick Sherry, the Australian, 20 December 1997. Reporting in Australia by Sally White, MacMillan Education, 1991.

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20 The Faber Book of Reportage, edited by John Carey, Faber & Faber, 1997. 21 Glenn Milne’s column, the Australian, 30 November, 1998. 22. ‘Sharing the Same Kennel—The Press in Parliament House’ by Michelle Grattan in The House on Capital Hill edited by Julian Disney and J.R. Nethercote, Federation Press, 1996. 23 ‘Partners in Parliament’ by Reginald Palgrave. A Report to the Westminister Press Gallery, London 1864 quoted in Parliament and the Press by C.J. Lloyd, University of Melbourne Press, 1988 from which much of the following historical account is drawn. 24 ‘Squaring the Gentlemen of the Press’ by J.R.Vincent in the Times Higher Education Supplement, 12 June 1981 which is a review of The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain by Stephen Koss, Hamilton, London, 1981. Both are quoted in Parliament and the Press op. cit. 25 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, quoted in Lloyd. 26 Lloyd, op. cit. 27 National Library of Australia oral history tape, quoted in Lloyd, op. cit. 28 ibid. 29 Caucus Crisis: The Rise and Fall of the Scullin Government, by W. Denning, Hale & Iremonger, 1982, quoted in Lloyd. 30 ‘Backroom Briefings—John Curtin’s War’ by Clem Lloyd and Richard Hall from original notes compiled by Frederick T. Smith, National Library of Australia, 1997. 31 ibid. 32 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, quoted in Lloyd. 33 ibid. 34 The Whispering Gallery by Hal Myers, Kangaroo Press, 1999. 35 Much of the historical account in these paragraphs is drawn from Reinventing the Fourth Estate by Julianne Schultz, Cambridge University Press, 1998. 36 The Courtesans by Derek Parker, Allen & Unwin, 1990. 37 ‘Ideological Spectacles. Reporting the Ratpack’ by Michelle Grattan in Media Information Australia, No 6, May 1991. 38 Fairfax Paper’s charter of editorial independence, adopted by Age staff on 28 march 1988. Reproduced in ‘Charters of Editorial Independence: An Outdated Concept?’ by Michell Grattan, the Department of Journalism, University of Queensland, 1998. 39 ‘Player, Pollies and Party Games’ by Paul Kelly, Australian Quarterly, March-April, 1998. 40 By Michelle Grattan, Australian Financial Review, 27 February 1998.

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41 ‘Jobbery Under Alms’, by Helen Trinca, the Sydney Morning Herald, 3 August 1998. 42 ‘One Job Not So Well Done’ by Dennis Shanahan, the Australian, 1 August 1998 and accompanying articles. 43 Kelly, op. cit. 44 ‘Editorial Independence—An Outdated Concept’ by Michelle Grattan, op. cit., 1998. 45 ‘A Canberra Tradition’ by Catriona Jackson, the Canberra Times, 14 May 1998. 46 Reuters, the Sydney Morning Herald, 23 September 1998. 47 Vital Lies, Simple Truths by Daniel Goleman, Bloomsbury, 1997. 48 ‘Cross My Heart and Hope to Lie—Trust Me I’m a Politician’ by Roy Eccleston, Australian Magazine, 26 September 1998.