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Risk of DeceitClaims that John Howard misled us are at the very least a warning Australians need to hold their governments more accountable, writes editor-at-large Paul KellyAugust 28, 2004
THIS week John Howard looked and sounded rattled. Too many of the iconic stories about the Howard Government are defined by falsehood and these are now media images in a repeating frame.Labor has won traction beyond all hopes with its "truth in government" crisis. At the start of the week Howard released a dossier to defend himself against ALP claims that he had corrupted our public life with his lies.
But Howard's nadir came very late yesterday afternoon. This is when it became clear that an anxious Prime Minister had over-reached himself trying to clear his name in the children overboard dispute with former staffer Mike Scrafton.
Howard has deeply embarrassed himself -- and the only exit strategy now is surely an election, to be called as soon as practicable. There is a distinct air of a fading government over the "truth" issue -- despite Howard's ongoing economic management and national security superiority.
In an effort to clear his name, Howard asked Defence Minister Robert Hill to organise interviews with the two defence officials who conducted an inquiry in late 2001 into the children overboard issue. Those officers were Roger Powell and his aide, Mike Noonan. The interviews were done on Thursday.

The aim was to find out what Scrafton told them -- and Howard must have been dismayed by the outcome. Powell's recollection was that "Mr Scrafton said he had told the Prime Minister that there was no substance to the claims that the children had been thrown overboard". His recollection was that then defence minister Peter Reith's office had been told by October 11, just a few days after the incident, that no children had been thrown into the water.
Noonan recalled that Scrafton had given a clear indication "that he had given oral advice to the Prime Minister or to his principal adviser that children had not been thrown overboard and said that the Prime Minister knew that children had not been thrown overboard". Noonan had a clear recollection that Scrafton said he was privy to things he could tell the inquiry but which he would deny if they became public.
As Howard said in his covering statement last night, these interviews are not evidence of what Scrafton told him. But Howard's problem is that these interviews he commissioned only offer more support to Scrafton's version against his own. It was obvious that once these documents came into existence Howard felt he had no option but to release them.
The PM attached statements from the four staff members who attended the Lodge on November 7, 2001, the night he spoke to Scrafton. These statements are dated Friday, August 27, 2004. They support Howard and they were written the day after the two defence officers offered their pro-Scrafton accounts.
However, Howard's former cabinet policy chief Paul McClintock says in his statement that Howard advised the room that night that "Mr Scrafton did not believe that the video showed children being thrown overboard" -- not exactly the same as saying it was "inconclusive", the word being used by Howard.
Truth in government became a personal issue for Howard this week. It started to bite because it started to affect his behaviour. His effort at self-defence has backfired. Labor has begun to define his prime ministership, a cause of alarm for Howard.
There is a risk for Labor. While the "truth" issue dominated, the Coalition still strengthened its position on health and reinforced its campaign on interest rates and economic management. But Mark Latham has put together four superb weeks and the only way Howard can shift the debate from his own credibility to Latham's lack of reliability is by calling the election -- now.
Former Labor pollster and ANOP chief Rod Cameron explains the potency of the "truth" issue: "We find there are three categories of voters. One-third support or admire Howard. One-third are antipathetic to him. They dislike him and their dislike is becoming more intense. And one-third are in the middle, inclined to say: 'I think he's fibbing but it isn't intentional.'
"This middle group is now starting to disbelieve him more and sees him as always shifting the blame on to others. There are enough third-party sources like Mike Scrafton to give this perception some weight. I think this can be a vote-turning issue. At the same time, the huge focus on Howard obliterates public concern about Latham. Their doubts about Latham still exist but they aren't being aired."
Precisely. Howard needs a circuit-breaker. He must shift the focus back to Latham and the economy.
The fascinating issue is whether Labor will keep running on children overboard and "truth". That would probably be a strategic mistake, though many would disagree. However, let's test the central proposition being put: that Howard's Government is pervasively mendacious.
This may be right, but the evidence has yet to be produced. The best analysis is offered by the outgoing head of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Hugh White, an experienced defence insider: "The hypothesis that the Howard Government has a systematic pattern of lying is not supported by the facts. What you have is a series of different events that contribute to this impression. On Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, I will go to my grave saying the Government did not deliberately lie. That's just a furphy. But the children overboard story was different. The process began with a bureaucratic mistake and a correction not made properly. It appears here that there are real grounds for saying the public was misled by ministers."
Asked what his former boss Bob Hawke would have done in Howard's place on the evening of November 7, 2001, White says: "I don't think Hawke would have found himself in such a position. That's because under Hawke the relationship between the defence structure and ministers would have meant that the story was corrected at an early stage."
The parallel point can be made about Iraq. This war of choice was a high-risk exercise for Howard. It is difficult for war leaders to predict all future risks and Howard was caught on an issue he took as a given -- that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. By deciding for the war option, Howard took the risk and he paid the political price.
Australia needs a serious debate about honesty in government. That won't happen now or in the election. The present campaign is not really about truth in government but finding a device to delegitimise Howard. As a political leader, Howard is no more or less truthful than his predecessors during the past 40 years. Of course, that perspective won't necessarily save him.
The refrain that Howard is an unprecedented liar doesn't stand up against our history -- it ignores the past and conflates the present. It confuses the difference between a lie, a broken promise and a change of policy.
* * *
LET us test the question: how does Howard's record compare with past governments? The place to start is with R.G. Menzies and his April 29, 1965, speech that sent us to war in Vietnam. The cabinet defence committee took the decision on the night of April 7. Australia then told the US it was prepared to offer a battalion if and when the US asked. But Menzies had no invitation from South Vietnam. So our ambassador was dispatched to procure from a reluctant Saigon government an invitation for a decision already made.
In his speech, Menzies said his government was "now in receipt of a request" from Saigon. Menzies didn't lie but he did mislead. Gough Whitlam's biographer Graham Freudenberg got it right, saying Menzies's "literal truth" was an "essential dishonesty". So Australia went to war in Vietnam at its own initiative, not in response to Saigon's request or urging -- contrary to the impression Menzies left. A war based on a lie?
When Howard sent us to Iraq, he genuinely believed it possessed WMDs; but when Menzies sent us to Vietnam he knew that our decision didn't follow Saigon's request. The moralists would say they both lied, but the simplifications of the moralists are also self-deceiving.
Certainly Howard deceived himself as a prelude to deceiving the people; Menzies deceived the people because he knew the truth of his government's proactive diplomacy would undermine support for the commitment.
There is a moral here: don't think that under Howard Australia has changed the way it goes to war.
How good was the public service advice on Vietnam as distinct from Iraq? This can test the theory of a lost golden age of "frank and fearless" advice, slain by Howard, as attested by his critics.
The recent Flood report points to the public service failure over Iraq. Released a month ago, former diplomat Philip Flood lamented that there was a failure to provide a "holistic" view that covered the strategic aspects of the Iraq war and the "costs and issues" for Australia. But was public service advice, in retrospect, any better in the pre-Howard days? Official historian of the Vietnam War Peter Edwards writes: "Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of the official advice over Vietnam was that there was no Australian equivalent to George Ball, the senior State Department official who throughout late 1964 and early 1965 consistently argued against a large-scale American commitment to Vietnam.
"While there were clearly many Australian officials in both external affairs and defence who were uneasy, none attempted to persuade the government to seek another course."
Substitute Iraq for Vietnam and the story is the same. Edwards sounds like a precursor of Flood and the public service performance over Iraq 40 years later. Surely the same problem didn't exist under Menzies? Sorry, but it did.
Edwards tells us why the Menzies government wasn't challenged by its advisers in the 1960s over Vietnam. It was because such public service resistance would have clashed with the intent of cabinet and "almost certainly would have required such an official to resign". Shades of today.
It is time to qualify the "frank and fearless" myths along with the myth of Howard the intimidator. Howard has devised a system to ensure that he gets his own way. But to even frame Howard in the same picture as the legendary intimidators such as Billy Hughes, "Black Jack" McEwen and Malcolm Fraser, politicians who really frightened people, is absurd. The same applies to lying and changing your policy. The examples constitute a litany, but let's just take a few.
Remember that at 6pm on August 25, 1988, Hawke and Paul Keating met at Kirribilli in front of two selected witnesses to enter a secret pact -- Hawke would solve the leadership crisis and buy Keating's loyalty by agreeing to hand over the prime ministership to him after the next election. The pact had to remain secret to work and the people would be deceived at the 1990 election. How's that for a big lie?
Remember that, after being sacked, Whitlam negotiated with Iraq's Baath party for a secret $US500,000 to fund the ALP campaign, the money to be laundered via corporate channels, and that Whitlam met the Iraqi envoys in Sydney. How's that for political integrity?
It followed Whitlam's quest for the Khemlani loan -- when a shonk was given a secret loan authority to raise $4 billion abroad in Australia's name, authorised by the Executive Council on December 14, 1974, as the Treasury went into meltdown, the exercise reliant on a bogus oral legal opinion offered by attorney-general Lionel Murphy that prompted future attorney-general Bob Ellicott's line that it was "unconstitutional, unlawful and based on deception ... I do not believe that an honest man could do it". Neither did John Kerr, who had to sign the wretched thing. He never forgave Whitlam.
If you're interested in policy changes, just tune into Hawke and Keating. Hawke won the 1983 election promising a hefty $2.75 billion agenda of spending programs and tax cuts that extended up to people on $60,000 a year. He repudiated the lot, yes the lot, in the first week after his win. How's that for being elected on a lie?
But it was the right decision, a response to the shock $9.6 billion budget deficit projection. Hawke, clever as usual, was given a tip-off and signalled three days out at the National Press Club that he might have to ditch his promise to meet the economic situation. The moral: sometimes it is responsible to abandon your promises.
An even better example is Keating's 1993 election win. This was based on an even bigger lie (using the vernacular of the moralists). Remember that Keating in his One Nation speech on February 27, 1992, pledged to match Coalition leader John Hewson's income tax cuts but without resorting to a GST. Posing as a fiscal Houdini, Keating made his huge tax cuts into L-A-W, as though passing the law could create the money.
After Keating's victory, the denouement was painful -- first came the indirect tax rises in the 1993 post-election budget betrayal, next came Keating's midyear admission that the tax cuts couldn't be paid in full and, finally, came the decision to pay half of them as deferred superannuation.
What did Howard do? He pledged before the 1996 poll never to introduce a GST. After he changed his mind in 1997, he put his entire GST package to the people at the 1998 election. That is, his change of mind had to be mandated by the voters. Howard became the first Western political leader to be re-elected on a GST platform. This is how democracy was once supposed to work -- elections made and unmade not just governments but policies and mandates.
The liar here is not Howard but the media. Howard introduced his GST not after his first election but after his second. The media's dismissal of this pivotal point betrays its contempt for the public's right to validate political programs and the right of political leaders to change their minds in response to changed circumstances.
How should politicians respond when their past is exposed? Let's take two classic examples, both involving Howard in the final weeks of election campaigns.
On February 28, 1983, five days before the election, treasury chief John Stone told treasurer Howard the projected budget deficit was about $9 billion, a disastrous outcome. Howard rang Fraser and advised that the government "come clean" and the figure be released. Fraser, quite sensibly, refused. He had no taste for election eve suicide. The moralists would call this a "lie" but no political journalist with any grip on reality would offer a blanket condemnation of Fraser.
The election eve deception was merely a symptom of the real problem -- the failed economic policies of Fraser and Howard. Bad policy had created their miserable dilemma. The lesson: it is bad policy, from war to the economy, that leads inevitably to lies and deception.
Fast-forward 18 years to November 7, 2001, another election eve week, when Howard spoke to Scrafton, an adviser from the defence minister's office. Scrafton's version is that he told Howard there was no evidence to uphold the children overboard story. It was a hoax. This is a disputed conversation, but let us assume Scrafton's version is true. What, pray, should Howard have done?
The media universally condemns Howard for deceiving the nation the next day at the National Press Club by upholding the story. But how many political journalists actually assert that Howard should have come clean three days before the election, thereby compromising his prospects? Frankly, I don't think any prime minister from the past 40 years would have come clean at that point.
Once again, the deception is not the real problem but the symptom. The problem was the high-risk policy of deploying the navy to turn back the boats on the water as part of a crusade to win the election and demonise the boatpeople in the process. Howard achieved his end of halting the boats, but the means used compromised and tainted his Government. The point here is that other prime ministers would have avoided Howard's dilemma of November 7 because they would have run a different policy.
This brings the complexities of the "truth" issue into play. Each government has its own character. Howard's Government is different from that of Whitlam or Fraser or Hawke but less different to that of Keating because it is nearer in time and institutional evolution.
Three deep historical trends shape and transcend the character of Howard's Government -- the 24-hour media cycle that demands a system of prime ministerial government geared to short-run political wins; a politicisation of the advisory process manifested in appointments, the running of institutions and growing numbers of ministerial staff; and a tension that arises from the decades-old shift to more ministerial power and less public service power.
Reviewing ministry-public service relations in the defence area under Howard, White says: "I think there was a problem based upon a lack of mutual trust and confidence. My impression is that John Howard wanted to hear advice the way things were -- nonetheless, a clear impression was created in defence that inconvenient facts weren't welcome. There was a pathology at work."
Good history tells us to dismiss the popular idea of a past golden age of competent government. Sceptics on this point should read Canberra historian and John Gorton biographer Ian Hancock's forensic study from the confidential documents of the famous VIP affair of 1966-67, the last grasp of the Menzian age.
This is not just a story of how prime minister Harold Holt and air minister Peter Howson misled parliament. It damns the public service establishment, notably the head of the prime minister's department, John Bunting, the iconic figurehead of the old public service.
Hancock damns Bunting in almost exactly the same terms as the Senate report on children overboard nearly 40 years later attacked the lack of accountability within the Howard Government in 2001.
"Menzies called Sir John Bunting the prince of civil servants," Hancock says. "But in the VIP affair Bunting let down Harold Holt very badly. He let Holt believe a lie. Then he let Holt get away with a lie -- until Holt was finally caught."
The incident was pivotal to the rise of Gorton, who finally produced the VIP manifests in the Senate. But the study, says Hancock, has another meaning -- it exposes Bunting. It shows that the old system of public service tenure could still produce fiascos on the scale of children overboard.
Truth in politics is important but not an absolute. A sound government (like Hawke's) had the ability to balance many factors -- policies, public trust and self-interest. The Australian public is realistic. It knows that politics isn't a morality contest. But it demands a certain level of trust from its leaders and Howard risks losing that required level.
The issue of the election is trust, a broader, more complex factor than just truth. Who do the people most trust -- Howard or Latham?