verging_on_random

Name dropping

November 24, 2006 on 11:03 am | In Uncategorized |

I met John Howard twice back in the early 1990s, when he was opposition IR spokesperson and I was IR Director for a national construction industry employer association. The Libs had an obsession with IR in the construction industry that started back in the days of the Fraser Government. Andrew Peacock as Foreign Minister had to explain to the Americans that one of their intelligence facilities being built in Victoria was going to be almost a year late because of industrial action by the Builders’ Labourers’ Federation. The embarrassment must have been acute.

Anyway over the years I had quite a bit to do with a series of Liberal IR ministers and shadow ministers: Peacock, Ian Viner, Ian McPhee, Fred Chaney and Howard. With the exception of Viner, none of them showed much interest in what real-life construction industry employers thought about IR. They had a pre-determined set of attitudes grounded in one fundamental perception: trade unions = bad. Good employers were the ones who were prepared to ‘take on’ the unions. Employers who weren’t prepared to take on the unions were gutless unprincipled worms. Being an employer implied, to them, an ideological condition with an associated set of loyalties. As far as they were concerned employers should be prepared to take one for the team, go broke if necessary, anything except treat trade unions as equal partners in an enterprise.

Howard was quite an unmemorable character. The first time I met him was at a private lunch. There were 5 or 6 of us; Howard was accompanied by Ian McLachlan (shadow industry minister at the time) and another shadow minister who made such an impression I can’t even remember who he was. It was rather a strained lunch; we tried to explain to them why their IR policy would cause major problems for contractors and in return they gave us an ideological justification that never came close to reality.

About a year later I had a one-on-one discussion with Howard in his office. At the time I was seconded full-time to the NSW Building Industry Royal Commission. I can’t say he made much of an impression on me; he seemed to lack humour, or curiousity, and didn’t say anything that was especially perceptive or astute. If somebody had predicted his future resurrection as opposition leader with all that’s happened since I would have laughed.

Two things about Howard did strike me. One was his instinctive ability to cherry pick bits of information from what was happening in the Royal Commission to suit his pre-conceived frame. If I tried to raise other evidence that didn’t fit comfortably in the frame he skimmed straight past it. The second thing was a series of questions that he asked about economic conditions. He wasn’t interested in getting facts. I wasn’t an economist and I didn’t have access to any data that he couldn’t get for himself. He was interested in what employers thought was happening to the economy.

I’ve thought since then that these are two clues to Howard’s success as a politician: his exceptional ability to use facts selectively in support of a position that he’s already worked out, and his focus on saying what people think is the case without worrying whether or not it meets the known facts.