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J S BATTYE LIBRARY OF WEST AUSTRALIAN HISTORY Oral History Collection
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THE WESTERN AUSTRALIAN PARLIAMENT PARLIAMENTARY ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
Transcript of an interview with JOSEPH MAX BERINSON b1932
Access Research: Restricted until 1 January 2005 Publication: Restricted until 1 January 2005
Reference number 0H3102 Date of Interview 14 July 1993-7 July 1994 Interviewer Erica Harvey Duration 12 x 60 minute tapes Copyright Library Board of Western Australia
The Library Board of WA
3 1111 02235314 6 INTRODUCTION
This is an interview with Joseph (Joe) Berinson for the Battye Library and the Parliamentary Oral History Project.
Joe Berinson was born to Sam Berinson and Rebecca Finklestein on 7 January 1932 in Highgate, Western Australia. He was educated at Highgate Primary School and Perth Modern School before gaining a Diploma of Pharmacy from the University of Western Australia in 1953. Later in life Mr Berinson undertook legal studies and was admitted to the WA Bar. He married Jeanette Bekhor in September 1958 and the couple have one son and three daughters
Joining the ALP in 1953, Mr Berinson was an MHR in the Commonwealth Parliament from October 1969 to December 1975, where his service included Minister for the Environment from July to November 1975. In May 1980 he became an MLC in the Western Australian Parliament, where he remained until May 1989. Mr Berinson undertook many roles during his time in State Parliament, including serving as Attorney General from September 1981 to April 1983.
The interview covers Mr Berinson's early family life and schooling, the migration of family members to Western Australia, and the influence and assistance of the Jewish community.
He describes joining the ALP, his role within the local branch, and the Party's structure, policies and personalities. Electioneering is discussed, including preselection and campaigning. The interview also covers service in the Commonwealth Parliament and includes issues that arose, working in Cabinet, personalities involved and attitudes prevalent at the time. Time spent as an MLC in the State Parliament is similarly discussed.
The narration ends prematurely and concludes with discussion on the 1986 election and with comments on Rothwells and "Black Tuesday".
The series of interviews was conducted from July 1993 to July 1994. The interviewer was Erica Harvey and there are 12 x 60 tapes. TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page number:
TAPE ONE SIDE A
Born 7 January 1932, Highgate, WA Mother Rebecca Finklestein, born 1896 Father born 1894 Mother's family and background Father's family and background Migration of family members to Australia and Western Australia Father's migration experience Education of parents and languages spoken Assistance from other Jewish families Parents married in 1922 Siblings Growing up in North Perth Father's work as a baker
END OF TAPE ONE SIDE A
TAPE ONE SIDE B 7
Mother's dressmaking skills Mother's role in the home Food Parental roles and discipline Description of family home in Glendower Street Hyde Park Schooling Yiddish theatre Ideological differences between migrants Jewish identity Bigotry
END OF TAPE ONE SIDE B 14
TAPE TWO SIDE A 15
The Depression Schooling at Highgate Primary School Interests as a child First interest in politics Second World War: effect on family Bar Mitzvah
END OF TAPE TWO SIDE A 21 TAPE TWO SIDE B 22
Household chores Education at Perth Modern School Pharmacy apprenticeship Joining ALP Communist Party Forrest Place Role in local ALP Branch END OF TAPE TWO SIDE B 28
TAPE THREE SIDE A 29
Role in the ALP Branch Split and the DLP Structure of ALP Union base of ALP "Professional group" delegates John Henshaw and the White Australia Policy Self-employed, professional and business members of the ALP Joe Chamberlain Election as a member of the State Executive Development of anti-Catholic attitudes assisted election National Civic Council State aid
END OF TAPE THREE SIDE A 34
TAPE THREE SIDE B 35
Nature of anti-Catholicism Joe Chamberlain Split and the DLP State Executive Married Jeanette Bekhor in 1958 Wife's background Children: daughters Jill, Linda and Ruth; son David Involvement in and issues raised in State Executive First experience of an election, in 1961 standing as the Labor candidate for Mount Lawley Standing for Swan in 1963
END OF TAPE THREE SIDE B 40
TAPE FOUR SIDE A
Observations of 1966 election Standing for preselection for seat of Perth 1969 Campaign for seat of Perth 1969 Electioneering in the 1960s Visit by Gough Whitlam Family participation in campaign Television campaigning
END TAPE FOUR SIDE A 45 TAPE FOUR SIDE B 46
Campaign advertising Major issues of campaign Opponents Winning election and taking up seat
END OF TAPE FOUR SIDE B 47
TAPE FIVE SIDE A 48
Role in State Executive in 1960s Issues discussed Tension between Joe Chamberlain and Gough Whitlam Old guard vs new guard Arthur CaIwell and Gough Whitlam Joe Chamberlain and Gough Whitlam Mick Young and the job as Federal President Development of own role in Federal Parliament Seating in Federal Parliament The New South Wales Right Maiden speech Centralist views Party Room Personalities identified with
END TAPE FIVE SIDE A 56
TAPE FIVE SIDE B 57
Personalities identified with Question time Party reaction to Vietnam War Assessment of Gorton and McMahon Governments Lionel Murphy Jewish Parliamentarians and political attitudes
END OF TAPE FIVE SIDE B 61
TAPE SIX SIDE A 62
Overview of 1969-72 period Electorate work 1971 received law degree 1972 campaign and reform of ALP 1972 campaign Winning government Lionel Murphy
END OF TAPE SIX SIDE A 68 TAPE SIX SIDE B
Election of ministry Running of Cabinet and role of caucus Significant changes Election of Bob Hawke as ALP President Yom Kippur War 1973 Bill Hartley's role in Victoria Attitudes to political policies
END OF TAPE SIX SIDE B 73
TAPE SEVEN SIDE A 74
Assessment of self as a speaker 1974 election 1974 campaign Success and aftermath of election Standing for Speaker against Gordon Scholes Joint sitting of House of Representatives Health Insurance Bill and Medicare Chairman of Committees 1970s Family Law Bill Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence Efficiency of committee system Women's Electoral Lobby Performance of Opposition Cabinet changes and role of caucus
END OF TAPE SEVEN SIDE A go
TAPE SEVEN SIDE B 81
Role of caucus Murphy's appointment to the High Court Influence of caucus Bill Hayden as Treasurer Factions As Minister for the Environment and a member of the Cabinet Performance of Cabinet Events of November 1
END OF TAPE SEVEN SIDE B 87
TAPE EIGHT SIDE A M. 11th Events of November Difficulties in working as a government after so long in opposition Gough Whitlarn and the Whitlam era Malcolm Fraser's role Defeat at election and resumption of legal studies Articles with Dwyer Durack and Dunphy Practice as a lawyer Retention of pharmacy registration Involvement with ALP Wish to return to federal politics and difficulties in doing so Federal executive
END OF TAPE EIGHT SIDE A 94 TAPE EIGHT SIDE B 95
Frank Mitchell and the AWU Defeat in preselection in 1977 Possibility of a seat in the Legislative Council in 1979 Contemporary view of Legislative Council Possibility of Premiership
END OF TAPE EIGHT SIDE B
TAPE NINE SIDE A
1980 State election Role of Legislative Council Change in Council from 1980-1982 Representation of Labor lawyers in Council Functioning of Council Support for Ron Davies and challenge by Brian Burke
END OF TAPE NINE SIDE A 103
TAPE NINE SIDE B 104
As Opposition spokesman on legal matters and parliamentary and electoral reform 1983 election Election issues Burke Government Work of Cabinet under Burke Attitudes of, and towards public service
END OF TAPE NINE SIDE B 107
TAPE TEN SIDE A 108
Role as Attorney General Law Reform Commission The Law Society Labor Lawyers Association Crown Law Department Abolition of capital punishment Equal Opportunity Act
END OF TAPE TEN SIDE A 113
TAPE TEN SIDE B 114
Mickelberg case Financial Interest Bill Attitude of Opposition to Labor legislation Parole Act Archie Butterley case Parole Act As final arbiter in some cases Judicial appointments
END OF TAPE TEN SIDE B 119 TAPE ELEVEN SIDE A 120
Judicial appointments and appointment of female magistrate and District Court Judge District Court Judges Backlog of civil cases Attitudes to wigs and gowns Attempts to remedy distancing of law from the people Changes in lawyers' practices, indemnity and Clarkson Committee Report Sexual assault laws
END OF TAPE ELEVEN SIDE A 125
TAPE ELEVEN SIDE B 126
Reform of sexual assault law Women's Advisory Council John O'Connor case Brian Burke and the Burke Government
END OF TAPE ELEVEN SIDE B 130
TAPE TWELVE SIDE A 131
Legislative Council's rejection of Aboriginal Land Rights Bill Seaman enquiry into Aboriginal land rights Royal Commission into deadlocks between the Houses of Parliament Attitude to parliamentary debate Ashton Diamond Mining Joint Agreement 1983 Role of Laurie O'Connell Juries Amendment Bill 1984
END OF TAPE TWELVE SIDE A 136
TAPE TWELVE SIDE B 137
Jurors 1986 election and issues involved Role of Opposition Rothwells and "Black Tuesday"
END OF TAPE TWELVE SIDE B
END OF INTERVIEW 139 MEMBERS OF PARLIAMENT
BERP'SON, Joseph Max
Pharmacist. B 7 Jan 1932, Perth, WA; s. of Sam, master baker, and Rebecca Finklestein; Iv! 9 Sep 1958, Synagogue, Perth, Jeanette Bckhor, d. of Saich and Rebecca Manzon; Is. 3d. Jewish.
Educ. Highgate Prim. Sch.; Perth Modem Sch.; Univ. of WA - Dip. of Pharmacy 1953, LL B (Hons) 1970, admitted to the WA Bar 1977, QC. Pharmacist at Mt Lawley 1953- 69; after leaving Cwlth Par]. undertook further legal studies at Univ. of WA 1976, articled clerk 1977, legal practice 1977-80.
Labor. Joined party 1953. Trustee and vice—pres. ALP (WA br.), delegate to six federal conferences of the ALP.
Commonwealth MHR Perth 25 Oct 1969 - 13 Dec 1975. Cont. Swan 1963, Perth 1975. Dpty Chmn of Cttees I Mar 1973 - 27 Feb 1975, Chmn of Cttees 27 Feb 1975 - 14 July 1975. Min. for the Environment 14 July 1975 - 11 Nov 1975. Member Joint Cttee on Foreign Affairs and Defence 1973-75 and on Parliamentary Cttee System 1974-75. State MLC North—East Metropolitan Prov. 22 May 1980 - 21 May 183; North Central Metropolitan Prov. 22 May 1983 (initially appointed to new province) - 21 May 1989; North Metropolitan Region from 21 May 1989. Cont. Mt Lawley 1962. Dpty Leader of the Opp. in Leg. C 1980-83. Opp. spokesman Legal Matters, Parliamentary and Electoral Reform 1980— Sep 1981, Attorney General Sep 1981 - Feb 1983. Attorney General, Mm. for Intergovernmental Relations and Defence Liaison, assisting the Treas., Chief Sec. (until 19 Apr 1983), and for Prisons (from 19 Apr 1983)25 Feb 1983-23 Dec 1983; Attorney General, Mm. for Budget Management (until 19 Feb and from 30 Apr 1990), Prisons (until 16 Mar 1987), and Corrective Services (from 16 Mar 1987) from 23 Dec 1983. Dpty Leader of the Govt in the Leg. C 26 Feb 1986 (effectively from 25 Feb 1983) - 16 Mar 1987, Leader from 16 Mar 1987. Member Standing Cttee on Govt Agencies 1982-83. Member Sd. Cttee inquiring into appointing a Standing Cttee on Govt Agencies 1980-81. With Sir John Forrest one of the only two persons to serve as a Mm. of the Crown in both the WA and the Cwlth govts.
NOTE TO READER
Readers of this oral history memoir should bear in mind that it is a verbatim transcript of the spoken word and reflects the informal, conversational style that is inherent in such historical sources. The Parliament and the State Library are not responsible for the factual accuracy of the memoir, nor for the views expressed therein; these are for the reader to judge.
Bold type face indicates a difference between transcript and recording, as a result of corrections made to the transcript only, usually at the request of the person interviewed.
FULL CAPITALS in the text indicate a word or words emphasised by the person interviewed.
Square brackets [ ] are used for insertions not in the original tape. VERBATIM TRANSCRIPT
An interview with Joe Berinson at his office in Beaufort Street, Inglewood on 14 July 1993. The interviewer is Erica Harvey.
BERINSON My full name is Joseph Max Berinson.
EH Mr Berinson, where were you born?
BERINSON I was born in the family home, which was at 101 Glendower Street. That's in Highgate and it's opposite Hyde Park.
EH And your date of birth?
BERINSON The 7th January 1932.
EH And who was your mother?
BERINSON My mother's name was Rebecca. Her family name was Finkelstein.
EH And where was she born?
BERINSON She was born in Tsfat in Israel. That's T S F A T. It was in those days more often referred to as Tsfos, a different pronunciation. It's English equivalent is Safad. That's S A F A D. That's in the Galilee...
EH Do you know her date of birth, or year, round about the time...
BERINSON Yes, she was born in 1896.
EH And your father, where was he born?
BERINSON My father was also born in Tsfat. That was in 1894.
EH And Mr Berinson, when did they come to Australia?
BERINSON My father would have come in about 1911. My mother was still in Turkish Palestine, as it was then, during the First World War. Her family suffered very badly. They were married when my father went to Tsfat on a visit in about 1921 or 1922. They then both came and settled in Perth.
EH The life that they both had in Palestine, was that discussed in your family, growing up?
BERINSON Yes it was. It was a very difficult and sparse life, more I think on my mother's side than my father's, but that's only in relative terms. As I said, my mother's family had a very bad experience during the First World War.
EH What had that been?
TAPE ONE SIDE A BERINSON 2
BERINSON Well, starvation and disease. Her own mother died during that time for lack of medical attention, but the whole Jewish population of Tsfat was reduced by something over two-thirds during that period. From what I can tell it was nearly all from malnutrition and disease, cholera and typhus. So there was only about a third of them left by the end of the war.
EH And the earlier history of the family. Had they emigrated to Palestine, years earlier?
BERINSON I'm not quite sure how long my father's family had been there, but my understanding is that at least his grandfather had been born there and maybe even further back. From what I understood they had always lived in the same town. The background on my mother's side is a little clearer. Her mother actually migrated to Tsfat as a very young girl. The reason that she did that was to look after her grandmother who had decided to come to Israel to die. That I understand was also quite common in those days.
EH Where had they come from?
BERINSON I'm not sure, it would have been Poland or Russia. I really don't know anything about my mother's father's side. I really don't know anything about my grandmother's family on my father's side either.
EH What was this little town like; was it an ancient town?
BERINSON Tsfat has the distinction with Jerusalem (again, so far as I know) of being one of only two centres of continuous Jewish settlement since the dispersion. So that's a very long history there. It had had a number of eminent religious figures there, and it was an extremely religious community. That, I think, was one of the reasons that some people who chose to come to Israel in their later years, settled in that particular spot.
EH And how did people live there? Were they able to farm at all? Was it that sort of country?
BERINSON Well, there was agriculture in the surrounding areas, but I never heard of Jewish farmers. Living was very hard. I heard from my father that there were many people who simply lived on remittances from abroad, and that was also on the basis that the overseas communities saw it as what's called a mitzvah or a good deed, to support people who were living in the 'Holy Land'. It again followed from that, for example, that during the First War people who had settled there from Austria or Hungary, being allied with Turkey, continued to receive their remittances and actually survived rather better than others. So there was that sort of inter-community rapport. There must, I suppose, have also been some family support, but that would have been much more restricted.
In my father's family, or my father's parents - I don't know about other members of the family - my father's parents traded in wheat and milled flour. Again in relative terms that made them rather better off than others, but everything was on a tiny TAPE ONE SIDE A BERINSON 3
scale. The wheat that they bought was from Arab farmers, both in Israel and, if I remember correctly, further afield from what would now be Lebanon or Syria. It came in from some distance away. When I say they milled flour that consisted of people pounding flour with a pestle or whatever one does, so it certainly wasn't a flour mill. My mother's father was the shammes of a synagogue. A shammes you would translate roughly as the beadle, a very poorly paid occupation because all the congregants were so poor.
EH Could you explain that role a little further for people that would not be...?
BERINSON Which role?
EH The role of the beadle.
BERINSON It would be a mixture of being the caretaker of the synagogue premises and performing limited and not religious services in the management of the services.
EH Did other members of their family come out to Western Australia as well, or were they the only members of their family?
BERINSON At various times my father had both sisters and brothers here. One sister married in Perth, but died in childbirth. A second sister returned to Israel unmarried and resettled there. He had - I'm just trying to think - he had three brothers here at various times. One whose name was Aaron, stayed and married here and lived here till his death. His sons still live in Perth. A second brother, whose name was, in English, Jonah, returned to Israel and resettled there permanently. A third brother, Moishe, who was an older brother, lived for a number of years in Perth and was actually in partnership with my father in a bakery, but then left Perth and settled in Melbourne and died there.
EH Mr Berinson, problems with immigrating to Australia. Do you know if your parents faced those problems of getting permission to enter Australia, those processes?
BERINSON No there were none at all, and the contrast with later conditions has often struck me. My father came out, as I said, in about 1911, and simply walked off the ship. There was no question of making even prior enquiries. There were quite a few people from Tsfat already here. The reason he came was mainly, well, was exclusively, to avoid being drafted into the Turkish army. He was only about sixteen, at most seventeen, at the time. The Turks had a habit which was very threatening, especially to Jews at that time, of simply picking up any males off the street. Then they'd disappear into army service for indefinite periods. The maintenance of Jewish standards was impossible under those circumstances, even apart from other difficulties of that sort of press gang military service. So young men just left. So that's the main reason, as I understand it, why my father left at that time. His early period here was very difficult. He came TAPE ONE SIDE A BERINSON 4
without any language, and often told the story of his first day here and the difficulty of simply walking off a boat.
EH Could you describe that for us?
BERINSON Yes, well there were no immigration hazards, I suppose, as long as you were white. He had no particular reason for coming to Perth. He knew he was coming to Australia. He would have heard of Perth because there were some other people from Tsfat here by then. But other than that, the only reason that immigrants like him would have chosen Perth was because that was the first port in Australia from the Suez Canal, so he just got off. No-one to ask him a question, but certainly no-one was there to help him.
By one means or another he found his way to the train in Fremantle and came to Perth. He climbed the stairs onto what is now the Barrack Street Bridge and he describes how he simply stood there waiting for somebody who looked Jewish to pass. Of course, coming from his background he didn't realise there were so many who could be not Jewish, so he had quite a long wait. He approached a number of people, but they wouldn't have understood him and he couldn't understand them. Eventually a Mr Rosman, who was a bottle-oh, passed by in his horse and cart and actually recognised him. He'd also come from the same town. He called out, "Are you So-and-So's son?" which he was. So he was, naturally, very emotional, broke down. But then was just taken home to Mr Rosman's home and started to work within a day or two and went on from there. There were difficulties we can't imagine in our circumstances.
EH The question of language will probably come up several times in our interview. What languages did your father speak?
BERINSON Well he only spoke Yiddish. He knew Hebrew as a result of the sort of education he had, which was a purely religious education. He had no formal schooling outside of the yeshiva, or religious school.
EH Now what training would he have had in a yeshiva?
BERINSON Well, purely religious studies, but again from what I can gather, although you have to, naturally, understand what you were studying, the texts were all in Hebrew, but the study was all in Yiddish. Naturally he had to understand both Yiddish and Hebrew, but there was no formal instruction in the language as such. That meant that there was no real understanding of grammar as a basis of language. That left him very far behind in picking up the English language. In the end he was able to express himself quite well in English, but in fact he remained illiterate in written English, and his inability to read it all his life was very sad, frustrating for him. He never got to grips with it. My mother on the other hand, (and again her native language was Yiddish) had studied at an Alliance School in Tsfat, so when she came here she had no English but she was fluent in French and she had much better understanding of language, so she became literate in English in a way which my father didn't.
TAPE ONE SIDE A BERINSON 5
EH This process of learning the language, learning English when they got here, there would have been no help at that time?
BERINSON Not at all. It was just a matter of what you picked up. Well, of course, if you're working you have to pick it up. After the children came they brought English back to the home, and gradually it spread. It was certainly a great barrier not having a formal structured knowledge of another language in my father's case.
EH Now help from the Jewish community when he arrived, that must have been his greatest support in finding work and somewhere to live?
BERINSON Yes. Not the community as a structure, but different families. He boarded with a Jewish family. He could not only board with a Jewish family for religious purposes, but also because it was just a natural thing to do given the language and the background. In fact he boarded with people, I'm pretty sure, who had also come from Tsfat. They didn't so much find him work as indicated how he might earn a living. He worked, I think - I'm pretty sure - for only one week on a job that he was introduced to. It was a case manufacturer, unskilled labouring work. This manufacturer was known to employ new immigrants so he went there. He found at the end of the week that he'd only earned five shillings so he couldn't see much future in that and left. Then he entered an occupation just because other people had done it and you could do it unskilled and just work at it. That was being a bottle-oh himself. That was mainly collecting bottles, but I don't know what else they did. They used to buy bags and whatever people had to sell at the house. A very, very hard life.
EH Now your own family, Mr Berinson. Your parents were married in 1922. Your brothers and sisters, where were you in relation to your brothers and sisters in the family?
BERINSON I was the youngest in the family. I have two sisters. The older of them is eight years older than I am, and my second sister is seven years older than I am. So I came fairly late and I was spoiled by everyone else.
EH [laughs] What were your sisters' names?
BERINSON Goola and Ethel.
EH Did you have a brother?
BERINSON No, I had no brothers. They were both named after grandparents.
EH Right. Now you were born in 1932, and as you said you were spoilt. You grew up there in North Perth, in Glendower Street, was that the family home?
BERINSON Yes. TAPE ONE SIDE A BERINSON 6
EH What was your father's occupation by the time you were born?
BERINSON I think he must have already been a baker by then. He was still a baker when I was old enough to remember and until perhaps 1942 or so, when he and his brother sold the bakery at that time. It was during the war and he actually went into the Australian Army at that time. He was a baker there.
EH Whereabouts was the bakery?
BERINSON Just off Oxford Street. I think it's only recently that it's had some shops built at the front there. It hasn't been used as a bakery for some time. I think it was just a warehouse or something of that nature. Of course, it was all done with horse and carts, so had a small stable there as well.
EH And the sort of breads they baked was it the traditional Australian bread of that era, or did they bake European breads as well?
BERINSON Oh no, they baked only the bread that was common on the local market then. On Fridays they would bake the challah, or traditional bread, for the Jewish shabbat, but I don't think that was a large part of their business. It was just a business up and down the streets and again very, very hard work. My father had no training as a baker. He picked it up from bakers that they employed. He worked both on the baking, but then did the deliveries as well. Again in those days it was night baking so that he would be up at two o'clock every morning to either walk or ride a bike to the bakery, and not come home till afternoon when the deliveries had been completed.
EH And try and sleep for a few hours, I would imagine.
BERINSON Yes, that's right.
EH Now your mother's work and role in the family. Did she work outside the home at all?
BERINSON No. Again I've often thought that she would have had a very different life in our time. She was, comparatively speaking, well educated if only in a different language, and a very, very capable woman.
END OF SIDE A TAPE ONE TAPE ONE SIDE B BERINSON 7
BERINSON She was a superb dressmaker, but I don't think ever considered doing that commercially. So she would dress herself and my sisters and perhaps help friends; for the rest just looked after the kids and the home.
EH Now the role then in the home, she would have run a Jewish home as such wouldn't she?
BERINSON Yes.
EH The role she took with cooking and providing, would it have been a kosher home that she supervised?
BERINSON Yes. She was also a terrific cook and baker.
EH Oh well let's talk about food then. [laughs] I don't mean that lightly, because I think it's very important and the culture and traditions that are passed down through food and through cooking and their associations with festivals and holidays and birthdays and gatherings, reflect a lot. Was there routines associated with cooking, with making things?
BERINSON I'm not... well, perhaps in preserving food or in making cheese.
EH Do you have memories of the sorts of things that your mother cooked?
BERINSON I don't really. In fact to the extent that I remember the general nature of the cooking. It was typical of what you'd call tsfoser meals. That is bland. I really only came to understand after my marriage that it was bland food. [laughs] I can't recall particular dishes. She made all the traditional dishes. You mention cheese. There's one festival of the year, shavuot, where we would only eat dairy foods. She would make her own cheese at that time.
EH What type of cheese would that have been?
BERINSON Well I suppose a sort of cream cheese. All I know is that you'd get lots and lots of milk and it would end up in calico bags, hung over the shower and dripping. I don't know what one did to it, but at the end it came out very delicious. She would put it into little rolled up... I don't even know how to describe it, it took an immense amount of work. Little rolls which were shaped like eights and fried. I've never seen them since actually. My sisters and I talk about them on an annual basis every shavuot. We don't have them now. She made kugel.
EH Now what is kugel?
TAPE ONE SIDE B BERINSON 8
BERINSON Look I don't know how to describe all these. It's a... You don't know what kugel is?
EH A potato cake, that sort of thing?
BERINSON No, no. You make...
EH No, don't worry. We can't do it justice. [laughs]
BERINSON Also she went in for finicky biscuits and strudel. Everything was homemade. She was quite a perfectionist in whatever she did really.
EH Was there preserving of things like olives and cucumbers done?
BERINSON I don't know whether we did it. We might have preserved some... yes, we did preserve some cucumbers. I'm just reminded of that because I came across a couple of large glass bowls recently which reminded me of them. For a while my father used to make wine for pesach, just from grapes. But I think eventually, with all of those things, other people started to make them, and we'd buy them.
EH Did you help with the winemaking as a child?
BERINSON I don't really remember it. I think my sisters did it.
EH I'd like to ask you a little bit more about growing up in North Perth, or Highgate I should say, and what it was like. Was there a lot of Jewish people living around you?
BERINSON Yes, there were quite a few. Outside of school I would think most of my social contact was with other Jewish kids. Certainly all of my parents' social contact would have been with other Jewish families. None of them lived very far away.
EH Just one more question about the family, roles that your parents took in the family. Your mother must have taken a lot of responsibility for the raising of the children with your father away so much. Was that the case?
BERINSON Yes, yes.
EH Do you remember either of them as being disciplinarians?.... or I suppose the way that their attitude to bringing up their children, can you describe what that was?
BERINSON Well, I think they were reasonably firm in their expectations, but I also think we were fairly accepting of them. That's certainly until say teenage TAPE ONE SIDE B BERINSON 9 years when the usual problems arise. I don't remember either of my parents ever smacking a child, for example. I just don't think it ever happened.
EH And Mr Berinson the language that you grew up [with] as your first language. Was Yiddish spoken in the home when you were young?
BERINSON It was spoken, but not all the time. I think English was our language by that time. My parents would often speak Yiddish to their friends in the home, but even to each other they would be speaking English I would think more often than not. But by then my two sisters had been at school for some years, by the time I can remember. I never actually spoke Yiddish. I didn't get beyond the stage of understanding it. But I don't think I would have ever responded to a conversation in Yiddish unless my life depended on it.
EH Could you describe the house and the garden that you lived in?
BERINSON Yes. Well I used to think it was rather grand at the time, although if you look at it now you'll see it's very modest. It's like all the houses in Glendower Street, it's on a 33 foot block. On one side the wall was built hard up against the wall of the adjacent building. On the other side there's a pathway no more than three feet wide; it might even be less. I suppose the reason I thought ours was grand is that unlike many of the houses around us my parents had remodelled the front verandah, which must have started off as a timber verandah, converted it to concrete and also put up a half brick - I don't know what you'd call it - half brick wall. To ceiling height that was covered by rolling blinds. In fact by pulling the blinds down and tying them, the front verandah converted to a sleep- out. I actually slept on the verandah.
EH Did you enjoy that?
BERINSON I didn't think about enjoying it. It was just very natural.
EH I think it was very common for children to sleep on verandahs and sleep-outs.
BERINSON It probably was. I mean these days with security and so on it's a bit hard to imagine, but I slept at one end of the verandah, one of my sisters slept at the other end, I think as long as she lived in the house. There was a second bedroom inside the house where another of my sisters slept. The thought of a young girl, a young teenager, being out on a verandah with only a roll-up blind is pretty inconceivable now, but very natural then. Again there'd obviously been some changes to the house in my parents' time. We'd apparently started off with the kitchen outside the back wall, but that was brought in. That was considered pretty grand. The bathroom was inside but the toilet, in common with the fashion of the time, was hard up against the back fence, quite a walk, especially in winter when it was raining. TAPE ONE SIDE B BERINSON 10
EH Did you have a wood stove or gas in the kitchen, do you remember?
BERINSON We had both. I was reading a history of the Water Authority, maybe five or six years ago. It was their centenary or some anniversary. I was interested to see that Glendower Street only got running water in about 1932. It's very close to the city, it's hard to imagine.
EH As a young boy growing up there were you very free to move around the streets and visit friends and that sort of thing?
BERINSON Free from what?
EH Free in terms of just being able to go over to Hyde Park and play without your parents being concerned, that sort of thing.
BERINSON Oh yes. You just made your own arrangements. We were literally across the street from Hyde Park. Again in later years I always used to think that that was the sort of area that should be for the aristocrats and, in fact, it was occupied by migrants and people prepared to live in smaller houses and so on. It was a beautiful area.
EH Was Hyde Park part of your growing up then?
BERINSON Oh yes, we spent a lot of time over there. We played cricket on a makeshift patch of ground there. Kicked soccer balls. No, I spent a lot of time there. Walked through the park every day to get to primary school. You take it for granted, of course, when it's that accessible. It's a beautiful area.
EH We'll get on to primary school in a minute. I'd just like to ask you a little bit more about the role of religion in your family's life and the part that it played, and the part it played in your formal education as well. Were you taken to the synagogue each week? Was that part of your family's life?
BERINSON Oh yes. I would go with my father every Friday night and every Saturday morning and, of course, on all festivals. My mother would usually come on the Saturday morning, but not always.
EH Then Hebrew school Mr Berinson, did you attend a Hebrew school there at the synagogue?
BERINSON Yes. The Hebrew school in those days was conducted after synagogue on Saturdays and then on Sunday morning and one afternoon during the week. So yes, I would be there on all of those occasions.
EH About how old would you have been when you started? TAPE ONE SIDE B BERINSON 11
BERINSON About the same time as I started primary school, at about six. I think I was five when I started primary school. So yes, started there at the same time.
EH Now the different roles that men and women, or perhaps your parents or relatives and friends, took in the Jewish community, how differentiated were these roles?
BERINSON Well, neither of my parents actually took any organisational roles, they were not committee members. They engaged in the usual activities, some perhaps a little unusual. My father, for example, participated in the Jewish theatre of those days, an amateur group that put on Yiddish plays from time to time. But they were regular attendants at the synagogue. They would go to the various community gatherings and meetings that were held, but there weren't a great many of those. I think my father might have been on one committee for one year and then decided it wasn't his role in life.
EH I'm interested in asking you a bit more about the Yiddish theatre. Do you remember any of the plays that he put on?
BERINSON Oh, he didn't put them on.
EH Oh he participated in them?
BERINSON He participated. His brother Moishe was a 'director'. He was very big in theatre. I have a vague recollection of actually seeing a play there, but I couldn't remember it at all.
EH Do you know the type of plays that they did. Were they traditional plays that they brought with them?
BERINSON Yes, yes. Oh yes, there'd be no writing of local material. Again I think it would only be an occasional... But yes, he participated in that. But for all the rest of us, it was a matter of the community.
EH This is a question that came to mind when I was looking through David Mossenson's book, Hebrew, Israelite, Jew: the History of the Jews of Western Australia. He has a chapter entitled, 'Anglos and Yiddishes', and he is referring to what is probably the more affluent and establishment life of sections of the early Jewish community in Perth. He's comparing that life with immigrants who came particularly from Palestine, and the ideological differences that emerged after the arrival of the more recent immigrants.1 Did you have observations growing up of any of these differences?
1David Mossenson, Hebrew, Israelite, Jew: The History of the Jews of Western Australia, UWA Press, Nedlands 1990, pp. 78 & 79. TAPE ONE SIDE B BERINSON 12
BERINSON Yes. Well some limited observations, but also references by my parents. By the time I came to be aware of that, that had largely become historical. Quite close to our home, in fact closer than the Brisbane Street synagogue that we always attended, was what was called the Palmerston Street shul. That was just round the corner from our place. It's since been demolished and become part of the Robertson Park Tennis Court area. That was established mainly by Palestinian Jews, I think, but there may have been a few Europeans among them. The Palestinian Jews would have come from mainly Tsfat and Jerusalem and some other centres.
The main reason for setting up in competition effectively, with the Brisbane Street shul was a combination of disagreement with the religious standards of Brisbane Street, secondly their being Yiddish speakers and being more comfortable in that environment than Brisbane Street where the - not the service, but the language, would have been English. Thirdly, because of some tension apparently arose in the earlier days in regard to the, what were really regarded as the foreigners in the community. There had been a group that was longer established, more acclimatised, more comfortable in the English language. The Rabbi was a graduate of Jews' College in London, British pro-Empire, all that sort of thing. He had a very distinguished record of service as a chaplain in the First War, and a person who was very highly regarded in the general community and a sort of ambassador from the Jewish community to society. That was Rabbi Freedman, and Dr Mossenson spends a lot of time on his role.
But for some time he apparently didn't appreciate the contribution that newcomers, even with their foreign ways, could make. What they had to offer was a much closer link and stronger affiliations to the orthodox or traditional Jewish standards which the Brisbane Street synagogue was supposed to represent, but in fact moved away from quite significantly as it became anglicised. So there was some tension there. That resolved itself after a while.
EH You've spoken of some obvious social differences, but political differences at all. Had Zionism or the impact of any early ideas about the kibbutz had any influence at all at that stage?
BERINSON I didn't realise till I was perhaps about 20 that there were any Jews who weren't Zionists. That just seemed a very natural thing. But I suppose in my case that was coloured by the fact that at a very early age I became conscious of the holocaust, which would have magnified the importance of having a Jewish State. But there was a Zionist circle in Perth from at least the 1930s. I grew up believing that everybody was in favour of that, and that nobody really had problems with notions like dual loyalty and all that sort of thing. Later on I found that there were a few, but by the time I realised that, they had become quite isolated from the mainstream of the community. It's almost impossible to consider the holocaust and being anything other than Zionist, at least in the sense of wanting to support a Jewish State, if not live there.
TAPE ONE SIDE B BERINSON 13
EH Now were those ideas linked with ideas of socialism at all?
BERINSON I don't think so. Again I can't say so. I can't say anything beyond my own impression. I don't believe I ever heard a political discussion in our home, either within the family or with family friends. I mean people were just desperately busy surviving and making a living and doing that under the most difficult circumstances. You'd have to sort of put into this context the fact that I was born right at the beginning of the Depression.
EH Yes, I'd like to go on and talk about that.
BERINSON Certainly among the sort of families that we mixed with, talk about politics would have been a luxury that couldn't be afforded.
EH The first thing I wanted to follow up with you was the idea of being a foreigner. You described that sense within the Jewish community. What about the sense of being a foreigner in relation to the Australian community which at that time was a very anglicised community too? How aware of that issue...?
BERINSON I must say I was always very comfortable being Australian. Of course you knew you were Jewish and different and you were sort of acknowledged to be a particular group. But perhaps again my comfort in that respect was because - how shall I say - the home-born Australian society didn't impinge on me all that much. I doubt very much whether as many as half of the pupils at Highgate State School, for example, came from other than immigrant families. It was a great mixture there, so if you weren't Jewish you were Greek or Italian or something - Polish. Jews were different in the sense that is always raised by the question as to whether they're an ethnic community because you wouldn't talk at school about - your teachers wouldn't talk about, say, Jews and Catholics and Protestants, but they would talk about Jews and Italians and Greeks. Now why should they do that when the Jewish pupils who are there came from Palestine and Poland, Germany, and perhaps other places. Certainly from Hungary, that I can remember. But that's a very well-known grey area. In any case Highgate School was a real melting pot. There'd be people who didn't like Jews and there'd be people who didn't like Greeks and Italians, so that was all right; I guess part of the mix.
EH How much was there of that, that bigotry?
BERINSON I was not conscious of much. I think that's really coloured my view, even in times when I wish I had been more conscious of it. I remember in very recent times being a bit cynical about the importance that some people were attaching to the ANM.
EH The Australian Nationalist Movement.
TAPE ONE SIDE B BERINSON 14
BERINSON The Australian Nationalist Movement, when it started here. Later when members of that movement were charged and convicted and so on and you came to understand the nature of the activities in which they were engaged, well I realised that the people who were saying I was too relaxed on it were right and I was wrong. That could well go back to the fact that I had grown up in an environment where being different was almost not being different, whereas the people who were telling me to be alert to signs like ANM, typically came from Europe and they had much better reason to be sensitive to it than I.
EH This would have happened at the time you were Attorney General, wasn't it?
BERINSON Yes, yes. Oh it's not that I was being asked to take official action, it was just in general discussion about the situation that I tended to not take the potential of it as seriously as others did. I should have.
END OF TAPE ONE SIDE B TAPE TWO SIDE A BERINSON 15
EH I'd like to ask you a little bit more about the Depression and your awareness of the Depression through the memories of your own parents. You spoke a little bit about it. In just a bit more detail how really difficult was it for your own family and their friends to just survive through those years?
BERINSON Obviously I don't know directly. Being born in 1932, it was really only a matter of later comments. I don't think we ever went short in our house. That was a combination of, I suppose, my father working very hard and my mother being a very good manageress. I'm sure it was very difficult. My father quite often referred to the extent to which he had to allow credit in circumstances where it was very difficult to provide, and the difficulty of people who he was serving to meet their obligations. I don't know whether I have the story the right way round. It seems incredible to me now, but he either told me that it reached a stage where shopkeepers were giving away a half pound of butter with a loaf of bread if you bought it, or giving away a loaf of bread with a half pound of butter. I don't remember which is which, but it was just a measure of the very great difficulties which they had.
He, I think, tried very hard to help people who were having difficulties. That would have added to his own, I'm sure.
EH Do you think at all that the effect on people's lives, on women's lives, on men's lives, were at all different? Were you able to observe them carrying on this experience of the Depression into the more prosperous postwar years?
BERINSON I didn't. I often thought, on the other hand, that I observed the effect of the difficulties of their own early years in Tsfat. My father, for example, could not bear to see food thrown out. If necessary he would just munch his way through whatever was left though he didn't want it, because he just on principle almost couldn't bear to see the waste. That I'm sure was not based on Depression experience, but on seeing people actually starving and feeling that it was just wrong to allow waste of food, even if you wasted other things - which we didn't do, by the way.
EH Now your school life at Highgate Primary School. Did you enjoy school, primary school?
BERINSON I think I did, with the exception of the last year there. Year Six was a terrible year for me, although I wasn't sitting for the scholarship because I was too young; that was the scholarship year. I've always remembered that as being a very bad year because of the quite excessive pressure which the teacher at that stage put on the students with a view to trying to get these scholarships. There was a very strong competition between Highgate and North Perth which might have been part of it. For the rest it might have just been his view that severe discipline was the only way to go. It was an extraordinary year and, in context, brutal. I've always felt he used the cane lavishly, excessively and unreasonably; it left a very strong impression on me. I disliked it intensely. The TAPE TWO SIDE A BERINSON 16 rest of the time, in the other years, I always enjoyed the work and the company and they were very easy years.
EH You were a good student?
BERINSON Yes, yes. I did well, so far as I can tell. I also didn't get into trouble. I was a bit of a goody-goody... What would you call it, goody-goody something shoes?
EH Oh, two shoes! [laughter]
BERINSON Two shoes, yes. Goody-goody two shoes. Terribly compliant so I didn't get into trouble. Well, to the extent that anyone enjoys study, I enjoyed it, and I enjoyed reading. So those were very pleasant years.
EH Books and reading, were there any aspects of it in the early years that you remember or you were attracted to? Anything that stands out?
BERINSON No, no. I really don't remember paying attention to what I was reading until I got to high school and was influenced by an English master there in a way that I appreciated. I can only remember in those early years two sets of books. One were the Biggles books, and the other ones were the William books. We had a lending library up in Fitzgerald Street and I'd just take out one after the other, all along the same lines. No, I don't think I showed any literary bent at that age.
EH Were there any other subjects that you were attracted to?
BERINSON At primary school?
EH Yes, or teachers, besides the particularly brutal one in your last year.
BERINSON [short pause] No, I don't think so. I think I was always a performer. Almost my earliest memory, I think it must have been in first bubs or second bubs (as everyone called it in those days) was playing the part of Tom Sawyer in a school concert down at Trades Hall. I remember enjoying that. I've always been in that sort of thing, or the school choir. Well, we didn't have a school choir, but I enjoyed that sort of activity in the classroom. On the other hand I was absolutely hopeless, and always stayed so, with anything visual. I couldn't draw to save my life, and never did.
EH What about music? Did music play a part in your life at all, early life?
BERINSON Among the kids of my generation, or at least the Jewish kids of my generation, it was compulsory to learn an instrument and I learnt the violin. I've always been very sad that I didn't take it more seriously. I mean I took it TAPE TWO SIDE A BERINSON 17 seriously enough to actually win a medal in one year. I must have been very young because I played The Teddy Bears' Picnic to win it but I, for some reason or other, didn't really enjoy it, and practising was a chore and I always had to be forced to it. That's a great shame. In later years I've come to realise that I would have enjoyed that. The only other music I had really came from singing at school or in the shul choir. I recently shuddered at being reminded of the fact that I've now been in the shul choir for 50 years, because I joined at about eight or nine, with various gaps as we ran out of either choir members or choir masters, I've been in it ever since. It was a bit like soccer to me, I enjoyed it without doing it well.
EH So you played soccer?
BERINSON Oh yes.
EH What sporting interests did you have, what teams and things like that did you participate in?
BERINSON Again that was within the community. It was the Maccabean League at that time. It's now called Maccabee. Just as a matter of course I played soccer in winter and then cricket in summer. That involved playing on Saturdays and travelling on Saturdays.
EH Was that a problem?
BERINSON It wasn't then, although sort of paradoxically it would be now.
EH Why do you say that?
BERINSON Well, I wouldn't travel on shabbat now. I've sort of reverted to my father's standards and my children's standards in doing that. We had a bit of a mixture in our observance. We had a traditional home and I suppose, by Perth standards, orthodox. My father was very orthodox in his standards. He (and for reasons I don't remember) intensely disliked being described as orthodox, but he was. He really didn't change his standards, the standards that he brought with him. But my mother was "more modern". She'd be regarded as very old- fashioned now, but more modern then, and she didn't object to our, for example, travelling on a Saturday or playing sport, going to the pictures. It was really just done here. It was a very non-orthodox community, except in name. I don't think in those days I would have ever heard the rabbi give sermons against it, or even try and encourage people not to do it. That was a sign of the times and of the nature of the community.
In any event playing sport was also a very, very regular part of growing up and I enjoyed it but, as I say, without ever doing it well.
EH Your first memories of a political event. Have you got any early memories of something that stands out in your mind? TAPE TWO SIDE A BERINSON 18
BERINSON I think I started to take an interest in politics at high school, but that wouldn't have gone beyond just reading the paper. I became a very avid reader of the paper. I don't think any particular incident triggered off any greater interest, but I think I was led into a greater interest by the fact that I did my pharmacy apprenticeship in a pharmacy in Forrest Place. In those days all the political rallies were in Forrest Place, so that used to be the way I spent my lunch times. I did develop quite a strong interest in actually listening to what people were saying and developed some views about it. I think that the first issue in which I took a real interest was the Menzies move to abolish the Communist Party. That's the first time I can recall feeling very strongly, even though I was quite young then and I was still in my apprenticeship, feeling very strongly that this was a very bad thing to do.1 For the rest, I think it was just a gradual increase in interest and a gradually widening interest.
EH You would have only been about seven years old at the outbreak of the Second World War, were you aware of the outbreak of war, or did it just gradually begin to impinge on your life?
BERINSON It's strange how you can remember an odd event from a very early year. I can actually remember being in what was the called the vestibule in those days, and hearing the news over the radio that war had been declared. It apparently scared me. I don't know how at that age I could have understood what war was, but I went and hid under the table. I can remember my parents saying to me, "Don't be silly, nothing will happen here." It's an odd recollection to have from such an early age, but I do have that. Even today I'm amazed at how fresh in my memory some of the events of the war are to me. I said before I'd become an avid reader of the paper. I think that that happened to me even in early primary school. As soon as I could read, I started what's turned out to be an obsession with reading papers. I can actually remember seeing the headlines saying that Tokyo had been bombed. Odd things like that. I remember very vividly reading about the El Alamein campaign. I could have only been about ten or eleven at the time, but I remember it very much.
Of course, then things like putting up the blackout paper on the windows. Again I would have been, I suppose, only ten or eleven when that happened. Air raid sirens. I can remember trench practice at primary school. We had the trenches dug under the trees and we had to have this practice with little rubber things which you put between your teeth or something. I can't remember why, but I remember having them and putting them between my teeth. [laughs]
EH I wonder why. Mr Berinson do you think you may have been aware of a fear in the Jewish community of what was happening in Europe? BERINSON I don't think there was. I don't think... either there was no understanding of how bad it was, or it didn't reach me. My father had worked very
11951 referendum for the dissolution of the Communist Party defeated by a narrow margin (EH). TAPE TWO SIDE A BERINSON 19 hard to help an uncle of my mother's and I think four of his children, migrate to Australia before the war broke out.
EH Where from?
BERINSON From Poland. My mother's uncle and auntie just lived on the other side of Hyde Park to us, so we saw them very regularly. He left either four or five married children together with their grandchildren, behind. They hadn't been able to get them out before the war broke out. I remember being struck later with the fact that I had not been conscious that they were desperately worried about them, and only at the end of the war when they realised that they were all dead that I came to be conscious of it. So I think people just didn't realise how bad it was. They knew it couldn't be good. There was enough of that to go on with. But from I what I can tell from the literature, that was quite widespread, that people's attitude was, it's not good, but without really having an understanding of how disastrous it was.
EH Now the effect of the war on your own family. Your father enlisted, you said, as a baker. Where was he located?
BERINSON He didn't ever move outside the State. He should never have been in the Army. He was too old for it. By then he must have been almost 50, 48, 49. In any event his religious observance made it terribly difficult for him. He went for two years in the Army without working on a Saturday, for example, or on any festival. That involved extraordinary difficulties, ending up with him working four shifts running or something, in order to swap with people. He just wasn't temperamentally for it. It was unfortunate I think that he...
EH So did that have bad effect, the Army life - the structure of Army life have a bad effect on him do you think?
BERINSON Oh, he found it very difficult. He was a very non-violent man. For example, when he was on guard duty he would always break the rules by taking the bullets out of his rifle because he just couldn't handle that. Well, that's not a man to have in the Army. He should not have been there.
EH I wonder what the reaction of his fellow soldiers was to such a thing.
BERINSON Well, they never knew. In fact he was very proud of the fact that on the only occasion that an officer came and inspected the guards and checked their rifles, was the only time that he'd omitted to take it out. He regarded that as a good sign and that someone was looking after him.
EH Were you aware of other family friends going away to war?
BERINSON Oh yes.
TAPE TWO SIDE A BERINSON 20
EH And the actual news of what was happening to European Jewry, when did that start to reach you?
BERINSON I think I only became conscious of that about the end of the war. Coincidentally that was... or perhaps not coincidentally, that was around the time that the Zionist Youth Movement was started in Perth. That was called Habonim. I was a member of the first group that was established and, of course, it would be a very natural thing for a movement like that to be stressing the experience. Whether from there, or just from general knowledge I don't know, but certainly I became very conscious of it, and I was very... I think I was quite affected.
EH That's what I wanted to ask you. It seems a shallow question in a way to ask what the effects were of such a thing2 - you can't probably describe them - or perhaps even whether people could talk about what had happened after the war.
BERINSON [pause] I don't remember a great deal of discussion other than say from lectures, visiting speakers, or a youth movement that had an interest. We would hear about it on memorial, commemorative occasions. Occasionally I'd hear about it as some of the survivors started to come to Perth and a few visited us in our home. There were not many of them that did come to Perth actually. There were not all that many that we had close contact with. Apart from that, not many of them that I did come into contact with wanted to speak about it. That also turned out to be a common experience, so that it's only in relatively recent times that survivors have been more forthcoming about their own experience. But one way or the other it became known, the general news, and just the sudden realisation by very many people that their own relatives had simply gone.
In our own case my mother's uncle's family (that was a very direct connection); a large number of them and not one left. So that impinged.
EH Now making your bar mitzvah. Have you strong memories of preparing for it and making your bar mitzvah?
BERINSON I don't have much memory of the preparation. I remember the party. It was in the Princes' Hall at the back of the synagogue. Really that was, perhaps, the first speech that I gave.
EH What did you speak on?
BERINSON Oh I don't know. I would have just spoken on what bar mitzvah boys in those days usually did, thanking your parents. It would have been certainly not deep. The preparation was not a big deal for me because really from
2The holocaust. TAPE TWO SIDE A BERINSON 21 a very early age I had participated in the synagogue in the same way as I would have done as a bar mitzvah boy except for the special prayers they were in English. The preparation itself wasn't the major exercise that it would have been for other boys who hadn't had that background.
EH Was this a real marking of that stage in your life for you?
BERINSON I can't remember. [pause] No. It was just an event that happened very much in the course of events. Really the only difference was a marginal increase in the way in which you could participate in synagogue activities. But from my point of view quite marginal. So no, I didn't feel I was suddenly grown up or anything like that.
EH Right. Actually I didn't ask you earlier, but responsibilities that you took in the household as a child, things that you were expected to do, were there some of these things?
BERINSON In what respect?
EH Oh just jobs that you perhaps had to do. Perhaps household things that were expected, jobs that you were expected...
END OF TAPE TWO SIDE A TAPE TWO SIDE B BERINSON 22
EH Not necessarily in relation to being a Jewish house but perhaps that, or perhaps it was just cleaning the bathroom or something like that.
BERINSON I've already said I was spoiled and that means that I was separated from a lot of the chores that would now be very natural for a boy in that position. But yes, I did help a bit around the home, even though most of the assistance to the extent that my mother had in the home would have been from my sisters rather than from me. I had one particular job which I only remember because I intensely disliked it and that was that I would very often take the chickens for slaughter by the community slaughterer or shochet, as he's called, in those days. He used to have a sort of a miniature slaughtering facility at the back of his home which was adjacent to the synagogue. Again unimaginable under current circumstances, but you'd have to take the live chicken there and bring the dead chicken home. I really didn't enjoy that exercise, so I remember it.
For the rest, I suppose I helped a bit in the garden, but there wasn't much of a garden there, so that wasn't a heavy chore either.
EH Thank you.
A further interview with Joe Berinson on 14 July 1993.
EH Mr Berinson, we'll continue this morning where we left off last time. I'd like to ask you first about your entry to Perth Modern School and your period of education there. Was it a scholarship that you took to go there?
BERINSON Yes, I won a scholarship, but because I'd started school a year earlier I wasn't able to take it in the usual way from grade six primary school. I took it from grade seven or year one at Perth Boys' School in James Street, where it was at that time. I then had to pass a supplementary exam to enable me to go into second year at Modern School rather than repeating first year.
EH At Modern School, did you enjoy it and what subjects did you take that you found satisfying?
BERINSON As best I can remember I enjoyed it, although in later years I came to regret very much the narrowness of the course that I took. In those days a student had to nominate very early for either a science course or an arts course. I did the science course and it was terribly limited; the only non-science or mathematics unit in it was English. I later came to think that was a terrible way to be educated.
EH And did you do a language?
BERINSON I did a number of languages, but only until Junior level. We still did Latin in those days. I think I did Latin and French at Junior. I also did Hebrew in the Junior, but I took that from outside the school. Then because we TAPE TWO SIDE B BERINSON 23
were in a transition period, the details of which now elude me, I did Junior German in fourth year. One of the results of the change at that time, as I recall it, was that we only did six units for Leaving, and again of those, English would have been the only one that wasn't a straight science or maths.
EH And what were the sciences that you did?
BERINSON Well, in those days it went under the headings of Physics and Chemistry.
EH Not biological science?
BERINSON No, just Physics and Chemistry and I also did Maths A, and Maths B, and... I'm struggling to remember the name of the third maths. Maths A, maths B. You wouldn't remember what it was?3
EH No. [laughs] I chose the exact opposite. [laughs]
BERINSON It had calculus in it. It had calculus and maths of that kind. I'm surprised to find I forget the title that went under. Just listing those units makes very clear how narrow the whole approach was.
EH Now the people that you went through Modern School with, are there people that you remember or impressed you, or made impressions on you at the time?
BERINSON Not really. There were some in the older years that I remember. Rolf Harris was one. Now that wasn't because of any particular academic prowess but because he was an entertainer even in those days. Garrick Agnew I remember because both he and Rolf Harris were outstanding swimmers. They were in grades older than my own. I must say that in my own grade; well I don't know that there was a question of being impressed by your fellow students at that level.
EH Did going to Modern School mean that there were connections that carried on into working life later?
BERINSON No. There was no old school-tie situation, if that's what you mean? In fact I suppose mainly because I didn't go to university I fairly quickly lost my connection with most of the students that I'd gone through with.
EH Teachers, Mr Berinson, were there outstanding teachers there? BERINSON I always remember two. One was Gerry Hair. I think his first name was Gerry. He was our English master at some stage. He made a very
3Applied Maths, see p. 33. TAPE TWO SIDE B BERINSON 24
strong impression on me. He really brought English to life and I found myself enjoying his classes in a very positive way.
The other main memory I have of a teacher is of a Mr Pollard who was our maths master. He was a remarkable personality. He'd come from England. He took us for Applied Maths. (I've just remembered what the third subject was.) He took us for Applied Maths and some of the units in the higher grades - four and five I think they were in those days - but he was just a remarkable personality. He would think nothing of spending the first half of a period just in general discussion about what's going on in the world. He was very hot on study method and examination method. Really I carried that part of his instruction right through all my later studies. I'm sure it helped me enormously.
EH Now in choosing a career, what led you towards pharmacy?
BERINSON I think I had always considered doing medicine and that would mainly have been through parental encouragement. I was probably put off a bit from pursuing that by two reasons. One was the need to leave the State to study medicine in those days. Secondly, the fact that the course took six years which, when you're pretty young and stupid, seems a long time. I think, frankly, in retrospect that my choice of pharmacy was in quite a large part a reflection of my immaturity and the fact that I did matriculate too young and didn't take enough notice of what my parents were saying.
EH Did you develop any special interests at high school that you carried on into later years?
BERINSON I don't think so. I was fairly well occupied just with ordinary studies and then with weekend activities in sport and youth movements.
EH So things like debating that you took up later, that didn't start at school?
BERINSON No. So far as I remember we didn't have debating at school.
EH And reading, did your association with Mr Hair develop any special interests there?
BERINSON I wouldn't call them special interests. I used to read a fair bit in those days, but particularly in holidays and so on. No, I don't think I went just beyond a very generalised interest.
EH On leaving school did you take a pharmacy apprenticeship? Was that the system at that stage?
BERINSON Yes. It was a four year apprenticeship. I was apprenticed to Southee's Pharmacy, which was in those days at the north west corner of Forrest TAPE TWO SIDE B BERINSON 25
Place, opposite the railway station. In those days the study in the first year was all done at night school, and in the second, third and fourth year was by way of time off for attendance at the technical college during the day. But the system was fairly strenuous because you just did work all day, either at the pharmacy or at the college, and then had to do all of your study at other times.
EH And the demands of the course?
BERINSON I don't think excessive. I think I probably found my study there a bit more strenuous than the average university student, having a full day to combine lectures and study. How strenuous it is just depends on how you apply yourself to it. I was a bit obsessive at the time, so I used to apply myself quite a lot.
EH How did you find working in a shop, a pharmacy shop and dealing with clients coming in and the whole process of pharmacy?
BERINSON I was quite comfortable in it. But I came to understand later that I wasn't really being satisfied by it. It took quite a while though before I decided to do something else. That wasn't before I'd reached the stage of qualifying first, and then having originally one and finally two pharmacies. It was only at that stage that I broke away and went back to study in an unrelated field.
EH Now you joined the ALP in 1953. Was this while you were still an apprentice?
BERINSON No, it must have just been shortly afterwards.
EH What was your reason?
BERINSON I hate to put it at so superficial a level, but probably the main reason I joined when I joined was because I was invited to join. The invitation, though, came at a time when I had been developing an interest just in the political process generally, and when I had found myself on nearly all issues (not all, but nearly all) tending to be attracted much more to the Labor program than the Liberal program. It struck a chord with all of that and so I did join, but I really was quite inactive for some time.
EH And what branch did you join?
BERINSON The Mount Lawley Branch.
EH Was that an active branch?
BERINSON Can I just interrupt? EH Yes. [pause] Mr Berinson we'll just check whether it was '53 or round that time. TAPE TWO SIDE B BERINSON 26
BERINSON Yes, it may have been a year or eighteen months later, but there wouldn't be much in it. In any event, in my early period I was really a nominal member.
EH There was dissension in the Australian community, I suppose, during that early 1950s period, specially with the Communist Party and the anti-Communist movement. It was still the Stalinist period and the ALP was still probably more strongly associated with socialism. Have those sort of 'isms or ideologies affected you in any way?
BERINSON I must say that I didn't come into the Labor Party with any real theoretical background or any strong ideological views that would lend themselves to a general description like socialism. My approach, I think, had been much more pragmatic in that I simply looked at individual or specific issues being dealt with from time to time and found myself attracted to the Labor Party.
I've said that there was only one issue I remember around that time that I did not support the Labor view on. I was young at the time, and I was still at my apprenticeship stage, but I'm referring there to the bank nationalisation. I could never for the life of me understand what that was supposed to achieve and, in fact, I found myself attracted to the opposition arguments on that much more than the arguments in favour of it. I think it was the same sort of approach to life perhaps which later led me to argue that the socialisation plank of the party had outlived its day and ought to be dropped altogether. Of course, at first it was watered down and eventually it was dropped. I don't think either the party or the general aims of the party suffered by those means. So I wasn't really ideological in a formal, or structured, or in a way based on political theory.
EH Actually I'd just like to ask you a general question about attitudes to the Communist Party in Western Australia and around Perth in the early fifties. Did you have observations of them?
BERINSON I never saw the Communist Party at close quarters. My attitude to the Communist Party was one of very strong antagonism. I was violently opposed to them, I would say. But that really wasn't again based on any problems with what their theorists might be saying. I looked at what Communists did when they had a capacity to govern, and I intensely disliked it. So I was very strongly opposed to it.
Some people might have thought it was a bit of a paradox (I never did) that I was equally strongly opposed to the move to ban the Communist Party. In fact I would say that was the major single influence in encouraging my support of the Labor Party in opposition to the Liberals, even to the extent of becoming moderately active. I wasn't active in that campaign, but later after having been, as I've described it, pretty well a nominal member for a few years, the circumstances of that communist abolition effort encouraged me to just become a bit more active. TAPE TWO SIDE B BERINSON 27
EH The location of the pharmacy there in Forrest Place, you said in our first interview, that you became aware of the politics in Forrest Place. Who were some of the speakers in those early days that you remember coming?
BERINSON Well, it was a great forum. I'm sorry to say that the main, or the strongest memory I have of any speaker is Robert Menzies. I say I'm sorry about that because I mainly remember him because I didn't like him. That also was probably not all that typical because he was very much admired and people used to think he was being terribly clever, especially with his put-downs at meetings like that. For some reason or other he didn't attract me. I found him very off-putting. But everyone was there. Chifley was there. I don't think Curtin would have been alive at the time.4 At the State level people like Bert Hawke and Herb Graham were very active. But there was just a constant flow of people from all the major parties and really at the highest levels of the parties as you got closer to election time.
EH Dr Evatt?
BERINSON I can't say I remember him. Well, he wouldn't have been Leader of the Opposition in '49 or '50 when I left the area, so to speak. He was no doubt there, but I don't remember him, no.
EH How did your role develop in the local Labor Party branch?
BERINSON Largely by accident. When I think back it was typical of a lot of what happened to me at the various levels of the party. I had joined the branch on a fairly loose basis of being prepared to be associated but not all that active. That was in the early fifties. But around the mid-fifties and I think it must have been associated with the wash-up from the Communist Party dispute, probably about late 1955 or perhaps '56 I... No, I think it's probably closer to late '56 - I decided to start attending the branch meetings. These were very low-key affairs. The first accident that happened was, I think, towards the end of 1956 in that the very first meeting that I turned up at after some absence was their annual general meeting to appoint officers and they didn't have anyone to be secretary. If I remember correctly there weren't even half a dozen people at the meeting, that's the way it was running, so that I was asked whether I would be prepared to fill in on the assurance that this really was not at all an onerous job and you could believe it from the meetings; they were very low-key. So really just to accommodate the request I said, "Yes," and that's where it's started.
EH Did your interest develop from that, from just having to attend meetings and take minutes and participate?
4John Curtin died on 6 July 1945. TAPE TWO SIDE B BERINSON 28
BERINSON I think it would have been a general experience at the time that you really wouldn't develop your interest in the Labor Party much by attending meetings of Labor Party branches. As it happened Mount Lawley became a fairly active branch, but even then it would be very hard to maintain your interest, because there were very limited activities there. What happened though was that after I'd been invited into the secretaryship at one meeting, it was only about one meeting later or two at most when the question arose of the branch's representation at the Metropolitan Council of the ALP. It was then put to me that there had been an understanding [laughs] in the branch that whoever was secretary would also be willing to attend Metro Council meetings.
Now I didn't have the faintest idea what the Metro Council was, but again I was assured this was pretty low-key; you only need to turn up once a fortnight at most, you participate and report back. So that was another non-onerous thing that was being suggested, but on that limited basis, that's what had always happened. So I said, "All right, I'll do that."
That was really where my contact with real Labor Party activity started, because the Metro Council was quite an important part of the structure of the party in those days. You did get to learn what all the branches were thinking, what all the unions were thinking. Again its effects were probably not nearly as dramatic as you might think, and most of the business was mundane to the ultimate degree. But every now and again you'd do something like expelling people because they'd gone over to the DLP and discussing things like State aid which was starting to become a major issue at the time. So that's where it started really so far as I was concerned.
END OF TAPE TWO SIDE B TAPE THREE SIDE A BERINSON 29
EH I'd like to ask you perhaps just about learning the procedures in the party. This being thrown in as secretary and having to go as a representative, was that a way of learning the mechanics of how the party worked?
BERINSON Well, it was a practical introduction to it. The theory was clear enough, that the party was based on branches and on directly affiliated unions. From there you went to district councils of which the Metropolitan Council was one. From there you went to the hierarchy in terms of constant activity, which was the State Executive. Above that was the State Conference which happened every two years and the Federal Conference which happened every two years which was over that again. Now that structure, that sort of pyramid structure, you could get out of the Labor Party membership booklet, which I think cost threepence. It may have been sixpence as inflation got to work.
But, of course, there's a difference between just seeing the structure laid out in a neat way like that, and actually participating in some of the activities and see the extent to which they really count, or the extent to which they really don't count at all.
EH Do you think that through that experience that you began to learn how the political process worked?
BERINSON Yes. Well that was an introduction. Again I must say that when I got to the council I found that my interest increased so that I would try and make a point, for example, of always attending. I can't say that I was all that active even off the floor quickly, simply because most of the items there wouldn't have interested most people.
EH Now Mr Berinson, the split with the DLP and the 1955 Hobart Conference. How aware were you of the divisive nature of this? Did it impinge on your local branch in your own experience?
BERINSON It probably impinged on the branch, but it didn't impinge on me. That's one of the things that I was struck with a bit later, that I'd actually been a member of the party, but it's probably an indication of how inactive [I was] that all of that had rather washed over me. Obviously I'd seen the reports of it, but it was really only when I got to the Metropolitan Council that I realised how I could not have been paying attention. I think I first attended the council in early 1957. One of the earliest things that struck me there was that there was a very strong division between various members of the council. I became conscious, without realising it for a long time what was behind it all, that there could be a quite innocuous motion up, such as for example, an extension of time of the meeting, and there'd be a solid block sitting in one part of the hall voting one way, and a solid block voting the other in another part of the hall. Not only would they be voting against each other in this coordinated way, but they seemed to be putting a lot of passion into matters like that, which simply didn't seem to me to rate any. Among other things, since I wasn't particular where I sat, I would find myself in one or other block, confusingly. TAPE THREE SIDE A BERINSON 30
It really took some time to dawn on me that what we were seeing here was a local reflection of the split. Of course, that became very marked within a year or so after that as several branches were effectively expelled from the party for a variety of reasons. Also we learnt, although it was not the council's doing, that people like Tom Burke from Perth and Johnson from Kalgoorlie, had by one means or another been excluded from the party. At that stage it really registered on me (and probably for the first time), how deep all of this went.
EH Because Kim Beazley senior would have been participating at the highest levels, national levels of the party too, at that stage.
BERINSON I had no contact with him during that time. His district council would have been the Fremantle District Council, so I didn't see him. But I suppose I must have been aware that he was in the group that was coming under fire and criticism. But it was only much later that I came to develop some sort of closer association with him. Interestingly at one of the stages that I was in the party but inactive and not really understanding what possible use there was in my being a member of a branch, I actually went and saw Kim Beazley and asked him if he could give me something in the nature of a reading course. He suggested a few standard texts. Crisp, I think, was one. Again for reasons which now escape me, I obviously felt that he was someone whose opinion I'd like to have rather than perhaps people who were opposed to him.
EH Were most of the delegates trade unionists?
BERINSON Yes, I would say overwhelmingly, especially before the TLC was established here. The State Executive of the ALP was not only the peak body of the Labor political movement, but of the trade union movement. It was a very strange combination when you think of it. As well as that, unions were directly affiliated and their membership was related to their affiliated numbers. Certainly in the early years the body like the Metro Council, or beyond that the State Executive, was overwhelmingly made up of trade unionists. I think it's one of the more striking changes that you'd see if you went to a State Executive meeting now, as opposed to then, how much that has changed. Even today - and I'm out of contact with the details of it, so I don't know the numbers that are involved - even today when there would be many Labor union delegates to a body like the State Executive, you'd find that the nature of the delegate is very different.
[break]
EH Now, Mr Berinson, just before we interrupted ourselves, we were talking about the union base of the Labor Party in the mid-fifties and your observations there.
BERINSON It was entirely dominated by the unions, but not simply by the unions in some abstract sense. It was dominated by what you could really regard as real rank-and-file unionists. These were people maintaining quite a TAPE THREE SIDE A BERINSON 31
longstanding tradition by that time. What I mean by that is that not only would you find that nearly all the delegates from the unions would be actual workers, but you'd also find that the union executives, who may have been full-time executives, had come from the rank and file. If you had the secretary of the Waterside Workers Union, he was the secretary because he'd been a Waterside Worker once. Similarly with all of the unions, they'd come up in that way.
In later years as the union movement looked for greater specialisation and expertise, you'd find that the people that they were putting on their executives would just as likely be out of the university, even more likely to be out of the university than out of the trade. In that sense you did get, over the years, say the 20 years after the mid-fifties, a very significant change in the sort of people who were coming in and the sort of attitudes that they brought with them.
EH Now did you feel yourself, even in those early stages, that you were perhaps part of this change?
BERINSON It's typical of most changes that you don't realise that the change is on. But I remember very early on in the piece that I came to realise that a distinction was being drawn by what I think you could fairly describe as the mainstream delegates, between themselves and people who were not union members in the sense of actual union workers.
Now I hadn't come through the university because pharmacy wasn't a university course. But I think that I would have been linked in the general view there with people who had. I remember one meeting in particular where Jock White who was, I think, the vice-president of the Metro Council, or even perhaps of the State Executive, very prominent (he was also the secretary of the Painters' Union), launching into quite a strong criticism of people who'd taken an opposite view on the particular debate, on the basis of what did they know? "They've only come out of the universities, and we have come out of the university of life, so that we understand the situation and they don't." I think I'm right in remembering that that had something to do with the White Australia Policy discussion, but in any event his comment then was memorable for me, because it was the first time, I think, then, that I really had this sort of division defined for me.
EH You were obviously in a minority then, from a professional group. Were there other delegates like yourself?
BERINSON Yes there were. I think that by the time that I came to the Metro Council, for example, John Wheeldon was already quite well-established there. He was the lawyer. Around the same time Keith Dowding came. He was a prominent religious minister, but with an academic background. I think John Henshaw was probably there as well at the time. He must have been actually. He was one of those that was expelled on the White Australia issue.
EH Can we just follow that through?
BERINSON Yes. TAPE THREE SIDE A BERINSON 32
EH Why was he expelled on the White Australia...?
BERINSON This was at a stage where there was a movement building up steam in favour of a change to the White Australia Policy. If I remember correctly, he was a member of that organisation and it was declared by the party at one stage to be out of bounds for Labor members because its policy was inconsistent with Labor policy at that time. He refused to resign. I think Labor members were called on to resign, if I remember correctly. He refused to resign and he was expelled. There were a handful like that. Later, of course, they were all re-admitted when the party's own policy changed. But that was the situation that affected him. I can't think of all that many others, but there must have been. I think there were always a number of teachers, for example, who you might regard as in a grey area.
What I think I should add although I didn't think of myself in that light at the time, and I'm not sure how other delegates perceived it, was that not only was I in a very, very small minority as not coming out of a "real" union background, but I was very likely in a minority of one in that I was self-employed and actually had a business. I can't think of who else might have been in that position. There were some, by the way, because I think it should be remembered that the party even then would have said that it was the natural party for farmers, and even for small businessmen, but I don't think that was reflected in the membership, especially of those groups; I mean, of those groups, the district councils or State Executive. In the Mount Lawley Branch there were self-employed and business people, but again very few, and I think not at all typical of the party.
EH And you don't remember being made aware of this strong difference really, by the party?
BERINSON I'm sorry would you put that again? Strong difference between...?
EH At meetings. You weren't made aware by the union movement of this difference?
BERINSON No, I don't think so. In fact that comment of Jock White's that I referred to is really the only time that I remember it being put as explicitly as that. By the way another name has come to mind because he did become very prominent in later years in very contentious circumstances, and that's Bill Hartley. He was either a university graduate, or more likely a university student at the time. I think for one reason or another he stayed a university student for 25 years and was always getting credentialed on the basis of that link. He was there at that time and starting to say a little, I would think.
EH Now I think we should get on now to talk about Joe Chamberlain and specially these early years of his influence and then later we'll talk about the national conferences and your participation there. Joe Chamberlain TAPE THREE SIDE A BERINSON 33
obviously wielded enormous influence, first both as State secretary and then as federal secretary. It was probably as federal secretary that you first came....?
BERINSON No. Remember that while he was federal secretary he remained State secretary. It was really at the State level.
EH Right, so he kept both roles right through?
BERINSON Yes, yes. Yes, he did have enormous influence. I sometimes think he hypnotised people because his arguments weren't all necessarily self- evidently true, or self-evidently correct. I didn't come into contact with him in any direct way at all until I became a member of the State Executive. That happened fairly soon after I became a member of the Metro Council.
EH How were you elected as a member of the State Executive?
BERINSON This involves another occasion where things sort of happened by accident. In those days the State Executive included in its membership, delegates appointed from the various district councils. The Metropolitan District Council was, I think, entitled to about 26 or 27 delegates. These were positions that were eagerly sought and, of course, to the extent that there was anything in the nature of factional differences, hard fought over. I think from my first recollection of it there would always be how-to-vote cards handed out, for example. Now I'd only been on the Metro Council, I think for one year, perhaps a little bit more, when the nominations were called for State Executive, and I nominated. I didn't get one of the 26 or 27 positions, but I think I got the second proxy position after that. Simply because of the huge number of delegates involved that meant that almost as soon as I got on the Metro Council, within a year anyway, I was also on the State Executive.
When I say that that involved an element of accident, that is because there was a very distinctive reason for my making this rapid move. I don't know that it had all that much to do with anything I'd actually done or said at Metro Council. It had to do with the fact, bound up with the split and the DLP and all of the traumas going on at that time, that there was a real sectarian division in the party.
Again I didn't quite realise it, but there was a terrible anti-Catholic attitude developing. In the end I sort of got into a relatively reasonable position on both the major how-to-vote cards because I was neither Catholic or anti-Catholic. I wasn't Catholic or Protestant. So I was apparently regarded as acceptable, relatively, on both sides. Now simply by not being put at the bottom of either one of those how-to-vote cards, I somehow came through the middle. As I say, I don't think it was any particular demonstrated virtue on my part. It was a very unfortunate situation that was going on there. Again it took me some time to really understand that it wasn't as clear as I've put it to you, but I'm sure it was. It must have done the party immense harm in those days, especially given the extent to which it had been able to attract Catholic support before then.
TAPE THREE SIDE A BERINSON 34
EH The level of bitterness felt within the party must have been extreme?
BERINSON Oh yes. I took it at face value when I first got there as being a strong feeling either for or against the people who'd won or lost in the course of the split. The fact of the matter is that most of the DLP were Catholic, though they had been associated with the... what was it, Civic Council?
EH National Civic Council.
BERINSON National Civic Council. So the fact of the matter was they were largely Catholic and as soon as the DLP emerged, of course, it had very obvious direct Catholic links and support. But the fact that it was as bald as being anti-Catholic took some time to impinge on me.
The result of that nomination of mine to State Executive gave me an inkling, but it was later brought home to me in a very dramatic fashion - by Joe Chamberlain as it happens - at a conference, at I think my first federal conference of the party, when the question of State Aid was up. In the course of just private discussion about that item, Joe Chamberlain made an extraordinary statement to me, and that was that I should be... He knew that I was basically in favour of State Aid, and I'd actually discussed with him an amendment that I might move that would at least keep the issue alive rather than defeat it at that conference.
In the course of discussing that with me, he told me, in effect, that this wasn't an area where one could afford to be naive because it wasn't just a question of State Aid, but of a basic Catholic program to dominate the world. I was really stunned by that - among other reasons, because that sounded to me very much like the Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world and very far from helping to persuade me that his view was right. That was really a terrible thing for him to have said at all, but certainly I didn't appreciate it being said to me.
EH That level of sectarianism is so strong that it seems to have come as not just an anti-Catholic thing as a result of the split, but something that was already present in society, as an anti-Catholic, or perhaps even anti-Irish feeling that existed within the party. Would you agree with that?
BERINSON I'm simply not in a position to judge on that. I wouldn't know.
END OF TAPE THREE SIDE A TAPE THREE SIDE B BERINSON 35
EH Mr Berinson, you were just going to comment on the nature of the anti-Catholicism.
BERINSON Yes. I really wasn't associated with the party to the extent of being able to say what they were thinking in the years immediately preceding the split. The impression I had though was that there wasn't anti-Catholicism there for its own sake, but that it really did reflect the violence of the antagonism which the split caused. After all it was only a few years before that that The Movement, known to be largely Catholic supported, had been an accepted part of the Labor Party's own processes of opposing communist influence in the unions. Apart from that there's the sheer numbers of the members of the Labor Party who were both members of the party and who supported it without being members.
I find it hard to imagine but you really have to go to people who knew the background in the pre-split years as to whether the cause and effect worked both ways, which I think is what you're suggesting might have been the case.
EH No, I can only ask you for your own observations, but thank you.
Now your personal impressions of Joe Chamberlain, his appearance, his character, that sort of assessment. Could I ask you to comment?
BERINSON He was - I didn't take much notice of his appearance. I don't think that either added to, or detracted from his abilities. He was a very capable organiser and he had a great capacity to persuade people to his point of view. You always have to wonder with a leader whether he's persuading people because he's adopting their view, or because he's really leading them to his own view. In Joe's case I think that he might have been able to tap in to a very natural reaction to the people who'd split off to form the DLP. Any party would have that sort of reaction to people who'd acted in that destructive way and the Labor Party has always developed very great passion with its various splits and with people leaving. So he was able to tap into that.
But above that he no doubt did have a capacity to persuade people to his own views and especially where those were as strong as the ones he held at the time, he was certainly very effective.
EH So would it be correct to say that the split was the main issue galvanising the Labor Party during these years?
BERINSON The years that I'm talking about are immediately after, or very closely after, the split. I don't think you can talk in terms of a negative event like that galvanising the party. That might have been the case if you were looking at a situation where people were saying, "Well all these treacherous so-and-so's have split up from us. Now what we're going to do is devote all our efforts and build ourselves up and come back and show we can do without them."
TAPE THREE SIDE B BERINSON 36
But surprisingly, although there was all this bitterness, there wasn't all that much determination, if I can put it that way. In fact when I think back on those years it's amazing to think about the extent to which the party just carried on as though not all that much had happened. If you go back to the Metro Council minutes, for example, you'll find very, very little discussion on the aftermath, very little new thinking on anything that you'd regard as basic. The only reason that the party moved to a substantial change in its structure wasn't because of its recognition of its own weakness, but because the ACTU said that Western Australia had to come into line with the rest of the country and have a separate trade union movement. That forced a complete restructuring of the party for practical purposes. But you would have thought that with the demoralisation and anger and every other sort of emotion mixed up you'd have other things. But if you go back to the Metro Council minutes you'll find it hugely dominated by just day-to- day affairs as though nothing all that much had happened.
The motions calling for the party to support a new telephone booth in some suburb or to have some minor change made to the social welfare platform, the number of those far exceed anything that you might think would go to basic rebuilding of the party.
EH Once you were on the State Executive, is this when participation in the party changed in terms of your commitment, your level of commitment to it?
BERINSON Well, again only after a little time. This period happened to coincide with the time that I was getting married and my wife and I were away from the State for a few months. I don't think I ever reached the point of saying this is an area of activity that I'm really going to dedicate a lot of my attention to. On the other hand I must say that getting to the State Executive was a further step as getting to Metro Council was, but a much more impressive one, because there you got a distilled agenda of matters to consider which had only reached the State Executive after having survived the sifting process of the branches and the unions and the district councils. So you were getting items of that sort. You were also getting into the company of a group who were used to running the party, more or less. The people who ran the State Executive ran the State conference. That's where you'd see your federal conference delegates, where you were more likely to see your members of Parliament and so on.
In general it was a more lively place to be. I must say it attracted my interest much more than it had been at either of the earlier two levels that I'd participated in.
EH You said you married then, in 1958; who did you marry?
BERINSON My wife's name is Jeanette, maiden name was Bekhor, that's B E K H O R.
EH And Mr Berinson was she from a Perth family? TAPE THREE SIDE B BERINSON 37
BERINSON No. Her family had come from Singapore, really as refugees at the time of the Japanese invasion there. Her parents had a quite dissimilar background in that her mother had originally come from Russia and her father was from Iraq, from Bagdad. So she was pretty international before she got here, and our family is even more international now that we've married.
EH I think you had four children?
BERINSON Yes.
EH Could we put down their names and their dates of birth for the history; Or just their names if you like. [laughter]
BERINSON I always get into trouble with years. Our three daughters are Jill, Linda and Ruth. Our youngest child is our only son, whose name is David.
EH Thank you. You said you went away in 1958 too, is this to go overseas?
BERINSON Yes, it was a fairly extended honeymoon. We went to Europe and on to Israel and took three months or so on it. Then it took some time after our return to get back to ordinary activities.
EH We should get to the politics. It's good if we can include some of your family and the interactions and the support that you had from your family as you went into politics as well. Now what were the issues coming to the State Executive? How did you get involved and how did you develop that involvement?
BERINSON Well, you don't really have to develop an involvement. It's just a matter of turning up. The State Executive (I think I'm right in remembering) also met every fortnight. Now what that means is, of course, with a fortnightly meeting of Metro Council and a fortnightly meeting of State Executive, you've got a very consistent regular contact. It then depends on the sort of issues that emerge. Part of that would have related to trying to sort out the problems of the splits still. Part would relate to consideration of items that different people were putting in for consideration at State conference and federal conference. For the rest, just the day-to-day issues that are coming up.
I think White Australia came up for review around this time. I've already mentioned that. State Aid was lively. As you got to conference periods, because it was a subject that couldn't be discussed at other times, there might be consideration of the socialisation plank of the party. On the whole that didn't attract much interest because everyone knew it had been there since time immemorial, and except for the bank nationalisation effort had not really been activated. A subject like fluoridation could suddenly emerge. That became quite a hot issue. TAPE THREE SIDE B BERINSON 38
EH Did you take positions on things like socialisation or the White Australia Policy yourself?
BERINSON Yes. Well, I suppose in the end you take a position on everything that comes up for consideration. White Australia was gradual, but when it went it went quickly, and I supported that. I had not been a member of that organisation that I'd talked about before as leading to the expulsion of some people, and I think it's fair to say that that was really because I really hadn't thought about that, or regarded it as a major practical issue. I think by that time White Australia was already being eroded at the edges with things like the Colombo Plan and so on. I just saw that as a very good way to proceed. I think my basic view was that it's really only a matter of Australians having more contact with Asians to understand that they don't really warrant all these notions of terrible threat and undermining and so on, that still influenced a lot of people.
Socialisation rarely came up. That was regarded as a bit esoteric. I think from my earliest days, I adopted the view that that could go without any loss. It wasn't leading us anywhere, especially after the change from the bald statement, the bald original statement going back to 1921, that the party stood for the socialisation of this and that, to its amendment, (I think drafted by Kim Beazley), to talk in terms of the democratic socialisation of this and that, to the extent necessary (dot, dot, dot). Once all of that happened it seemed to me pretty clear there was no reality in this thing; none of the real programs of the Labor Party depended on it. We may as well be rid of it as not only unnecessary, but really lead in the saddle, in terms of approach to the electorate at that time.
Fluoridation. I think I ended up sort of leading some sort of charge on that. The main opponent, of course, was John Tonkin, and he was very strongly opposed. But eventually we had either a special State conference, or it was a major item at a State conference. I think I presented quite a long paper, or something in advance of that. In any event eventually that was adopted.
State Aid was a hugely contentious issue over this whole period. I consistently supported that against some very violent opposition. Eventually that came through as well.
EH Now what was your first experience of being involved in an election, either a State or federal election?
BERINSON That was 1961 and I stood as the Labor candidate for Mount Lawley. The boundaries had been redrawn and one result of that was that Ray O'Connor who'd previously been in another seat, nominated for that, so that was part of his career as well.
My nomination there again didn't reflect any sudden emergence of a political ambition. It's a bit odd thinking back, because it was a re-run of the Metro Council membership. It was a matter of sitting at a Mount Lawley Branch meeting with a request from State Executive, probably, that we help to find a nominee, and TAPE THREE SIDE B BERINSON 39
everybody looking at everybody else in the room, and somebody saying, "You work here, what say you nominate?" I'd say, "Well that would be an interesting, different experience." [laughs] And I said, "Yes." There was certainly no question of my pushing myself for that. Of course we were going to lose, given the nature of the seat. But once I nominated I think it's fair to say we ran much more of a campaign than people in Mount Lawley were used to from the Labor Party, and in the impossible circumstances did reasonably well.
EH What was the reaction of your family?
BERINSON Well, it's really a question of my wife's position on all of this, and she's been remarkably understanding of my foibles in terms of political activity. She's never been politically active herself. I don't think you could put her in the category of spouses who've helped their husbands in a political career because of political interest, but she was always very supportive. It would be quite impossible to enter into the sort of activities that I did from about that time on without very strong support in that sense from home.
EH So your first campaign then, Mr Berinson, organising it, did you have a campaign manager, all that sort of thing?
BERINSON No, I was my campaign manager.
EH Doorknocking, was this your first experience of doorknocking?
BERINSON I probably had doorknocked for other candidates in a limited way before then, but it was certainly my first substantial effort at that. I don't think I enjoyed it then. I don't think I enjoyed it later. Frankly, unlike the received wisdom on the subject, I've always had my doubts as to the effectiveness of it.
EH Why is that?
BERINSON Well maybe it's more effective for people who are more effective than I am at the doorstep, but my own experience was that people almost without exception will be at least polite, if not friendly, and almost without exception won't have the faintest interest in discussing anything about the election with you. You'll pass a few general comments, but very few really want to discuss anything, and of those, almost all want to discuss matters on the basis of their mind's made up and you're not going to change it, and that includes who they're going to vote for.
EH It must be a very disconcerting experience.
BERINSON Just add it to the list.
TAPE THREE SIDE B BERINSON 40
EH Now after this election, standing for the Mount Lawley seat in the State election, 1961, was this a point where a political career seemed a possibility to you?
BERINSON [short pause] I frankly don't remember, but I think the answer's possibly yes. The reason that I think I'm entitled to say that even then was that I wasn't at all clear that that was a route that I would follow, because the next time that I stood as a candidate, which was in the federal election in '63, I hadn't been considering nominating for it. Again it was an occasion where it was suggested that I nominate. Strangely all other circumstances considered the suggestion was by Joe Chamberlain, who had been impressed, I think, with my Mount Lawley campaign and especially by the fact that I'd appeared a couple of times on television in the course of that campaign.
EH Oh, this would have been early days of television campaigning.
BERINSON It was, right; it was the very earliest. I'd felt quite comfortable with it, and I think I must have performed reasonably well to have attracted his attention. So I think I'd put it this way, I don't think I'd had anything concrete in mind at that time, but probably my appetite had been whetted enough that eventually I would have nominated somewhere. I think that would have happened. I don't think it would have happened as early as 1963 if I'd not only had the suggestion put to me, but effectively put to me by someone who could actually make sure that the nomination fell that way.
EH And is that what happened in 1963, in the seat of Swan?
BERINSON Yes. I nominated for Swan. It was a very big campaign. I think again we did reasonably well, but lost. I've always had a theory that that election was influenced by the assassination of John Kennedy on the day. I'm almost sure it did make a difference. I don't know how that difference should have shown up. I think others have said that if anything it might have just led people to stay with who they knew, which was the present government. I don't know whether it had the sort of effect that would have made any difference given the margin in that particular seat. But I'm sure it had an effect, because it affected me. I was just conscious of people who I saw on the street or near the booths, just being quite stunned by it, in a way that might surprise you considering that after all that was in America and we're in Australia.
EH Someone else had died that year that was mentioned as a possible influence. I'm thinking of Geoffrey Bolton's history, was Archbishop Mannix died around that time. Does that mean anything, or have any significance or anything?
BERINSON No, none that came to my attention.
END OF SIDE B TAPE THREE TAPE FOUR SIDE A BERINSON 41
A further interview with Joe Berinson recorded on 28 October 1993.
EH Mr Berinson, today we'll pretty well stick to looking at the elections. We finished last time with the 1963 election, when you stood for the seat of Swan. You didn't stand in 1966 for the Federal election, but could I ask you for your observations of that election, of Arthur Calwell's role in the election, and if you could describe your participation at all at that stage?
BERINSON As best I can recall it, I hardly participated at all in that election, although I would have been doing a number of the ordinary branch member type jobs in both Swan and Perth. By that, I mean helping with the distribution of pamphlets and how to vote cards, and things of that sort. I actually have some difficulty in remembering why I didn't nominate that year. I think there was probably a mixture of reasons, but one of them almost certainly would have been the view I had that we weren't going to win. I think I may also have had a view that I wasn't going to get a preselection, but I'm not too sure about that second one. In fact, the competition that year wasn't all that strong, no doubt because other people thought we weren't going to win as well. There were some other factors involved. I had opened a new and larger pharmacy than I'd previously run, in about 1964 or '65, and that may have inhibited me a little.
As a sort of strange by-product of my political activity, I had, in fact, opened the second pharmacy in Victoria Park, in the Swan electorate, and that was because I'd been so impressed during the '63 election at the number of people who were taking pamphlets from me at the crosswalk in Victoria Park, that I thought it must be a good site for a pharmacy. [laughter]
Again, if I remember correctly, I got the strong impression as the election campaign proceeded that we weren't going to do nearly as badly as I had thought and, in fact, I came to regret that I had not nominated. Again I can't remember the detail but my recollection is that although we did very badly indeed throughout Australia, we did better, and even significantly better than the Australia average, so to speak, in this State. However, we didn't win Swan, and that really had to wait until the '69 election for the swing.
EH Now, the '69 election, had you decided to stand for preselection? What were the circumstances surrounding preselection and your decision to stand for the seat of Perth in '69?
BERINSON There was a very tangled background to my eventual election for Perth. I think I may have made some comment when I was talking earlier about my first going on to Metro Council and then State Executive. I think I spoke in terms of things happening to me by accident. There was an element of that in the 1969 campaign as well. I originally nominated for Swan and I frankly thought that I had a good prospect of getting that preselection on the basis of my showing in 1963 as the candidate in that area, and also because by 1969 I would TAPE FOUR SIDE A BERINSON 42
have been better known in Swan than I was in 1963. I'd really had no connection with that electorate before my nomination in '63 and, of course, since I'd opened my pharmacy there I'd had a lot more personal contact with people than I'd had previously. So I thought I was a reasonable prospect there. In fact I was defeated. Adrian Bennett got the nomination in circumstances that left me feeling quite bad, because of the sort of background campaign that had been waged about me. Again, it requires going off at some sort of tangent to provide a background for that.
EH Could you do that?
BERINSON Well, in general terms it boiled down to the fact that since 1963, when I had in fact been invited by Joe Chamberlain to stand in Swan, I'd become a lot more active in the party and in its management levels, particularly in respect of my membership of the offices of the State Executive. In that period I had also clearly come to be identified as one of those in the party (one of the very few in the party, I might say) who regularly opposed Joe Chamberlain, and although it was by no means the only aspect of that question, one that would certainly have rankled with him was the fact that over that period I had consistently supported Gough Whitlam while he was not in everyone's good books. There were other issues which I don't think need going into detail. In any event, I was off side with what would have to be regarded as the only organised group at the State Executive level at that time. It's very hard to say what they stood for. Some people regarded them as the Chamberlain faction. They were often referred to as the `left faction'. The problem with describing them as the left faction was that it usually requires some contrast with the right faction, and there really wasn't any other faction. There was just one organised group and you were either in it or you were part of "the remainders", so to speak. Well, I was in the remainders.
In any event there was quite a vicious campaign against me with accusations of having all sorts of anti-party sentiments and activities. Some comments were really quite absurd in attempting to link me to the movement of the DLP. I knew nothing about them. I certainly had had no contact, but that was the sort of thing that was around, and as a result, as I've said, leaving me a bit put out with the result of the election, not so much because of the result, but because of what had led to it.
I think that would have been the end of any consideration by me of participating in the 1969 election, and perhaps even ever. But another very unusual event occurred which threw open the preselection for Perth, despite the fact that it had already been decided. What happened was that the selected candidate committed suicide. When [new] nominations were called for Perth, I put forward my name, but I must say that that was as much a gesture of criticism of the State Executive's treatment of me in Swan, as of anything else. I didn't really expect to win. There was one unusual factor in the preselection meeting, and that arose TAPE FOUR SIDE A BERINSON 43
from the fact that Tom Burke, the former Federal Member for Perth, was one of the nominees. I don't know if I've mentioned that previously. EH No, no, you haven't actually.
BERINSON Well, he had been very prominent as a member in the Curtin/Chifley days, to the extent of once nominating for leadership, I think, against Dr Evatt. He'd fallen foul of the anti-DLP sentiment in the party, although he was not a member of the DLP himself. He was much weakened by that and eventually lost his seat to Fred Chaney. He was subsequently declared to have left the party by a most peculiar process which sort of had the party considering its position for years.
We don't need to go into the detail of it. Suffice to say that on a motion by Joe Chamberlain, Tom Burke was deemed to have resigned from the party. He wasn't expelled. Tom Burke, for years, had a running campaign claiming that he was still a member of the party and that he had never resigned. The upshot was, that after a number of years of attempting to claim that he was and always had been a member of the party, he accepted the reality that that wasn't going to ever be accepted and he started moving to have himself readmitted. That met strong opposition and eventually his admission resulted from a motion at the State Conference. It was moved by Herb Graham and it was seconded by me. It was carried against some quite bitter antagonism. At any event, after all of that, he and I ended up nominating for the Perth seat.
To round off the peculiarities associated with this, I should say that I didn't expect to get the preselection. There were two reasons for that: firstly, my failure to get preselection in Swan where I thought by then I'd have a stronger case, even though I lived in Perth; and secondly, because of the nature of my preselection speech to the State Executive. As I remember it I spent most of my time abusing them rather than asking for their friendly consideration.
EH How vehement was it?
BERINSON It was pretty vehement. I really told them what I thought about the campaign against me in Swan and, in fact, the large part of the reason for my nominating was to give me the opportunity to do that.
EH Was this particularly directed at Joe Chamberlain?
BERINSON No, it wasn't. It was widespread but I can't see that he would not have participated in it. In any event, I gave that speech, got it off my chest, and then went home without bothering to wait for the count, which I really felt had to go in favour of someone else. As a result I was quite surprised later to get a phone call to say that I was actually the candidate.
EH Well, Mr Berinson, you must admit you were obviously surprised to receive the nomination. [laughs] The organising of that campaign TAPE FOUR SIDE A BERINSON 44
then, how did you set about that? Gough Whitlam came over for a fundraising dinner and the launch of your campaign. Was that the beginning of it? BERINSON I think that was the first major event in the campaign, and unlike my earlier experience in Swan where I was only nominated, I think, it was six weeks or two months, before the election, it took place over several months before. Even that dinner, by the way, was not without its sidelights, and they provided another very interesting contrast for me in the way that everything about elections has changed so dramatically in a matter of about 20 years.
In the 1960s, including the 1969 election, you could only regard our campaigns as examples of rank amateurism. There was a central campaign which was run out of State Executive office. Joe Chamberlain was the campaign director, but there was hardly any money in those days, and to an enormous extent candidates were simply left to their own devices. In my own case, part of the reason for the Whitlam dinner was actually to raise money. I was the first one to be so bold as to suggest that we should be running this dinner on the basis of.... When was decimal currency? I was so bold as to develop the idea that we should charge $20 a ticket. I was looking to raise about $1000. These days that would be regarded as pin money; it's nothing at all. If you have the leader of the party you charge $100 or $200 a head, $1000 is regarded as just something that it's nice to have but really doesn't achieve anything. Well, I don't think we could have ever had a function that cost more than about $2.50, because it not only caused a lot of surprise, but to my amazement, it also developed a lot of antagonism, and there were a number of branches in my area who actually passed resolutions on the basis that it was improper for a Labor candidate to be asking people for $20 because that was elitist. Now that went on to the extent that even though I provided each of the branches with complimentary tickets, a number of them wouldn't use them. Again these days the branches are so used to being milked at every possibility and opportunity, that that would just seem strange. But it was almost treated as though it was somehow wrong in principle to actually raise money and run a slightly larger campaign.
In any event, the dinner itself took a lot of work with the selling of tickets. As a result of all of that, it was a good function. It got good media coverage which was important. I don't think we made the $1000 out of it that I hoped, but it was a good encouragement to a number of people who then helped in the actual organisation.
EH So you gathered a team around you, did you?
BERINSON I sort of gathered a team. It was a mixture. In that, and in all my subsequent Federal campaigns, I relied very heavily on the State members of Parliament in the area. They had established electioneering frameworks, based in turn, of course, on the branches. So really most of my organisation was done through them and through the branches rather than with what you might call a separate election committee.
TAPE FOUR SIDE A BERINSON 45
EH I should ask you do you recollect at all what Gough's speech was that night? Was it a rallying sort of call for the party at all? BERINSON No, I think the main content of it was that his policies, and particularly given the fact that it was the electorate of Perth, emphasising his policies of the development of the cities in Australia, which was then a big item. So it was a fairly standard sort of electioneering speech in that sense, but he was a very good speaker and he could put all of that into a very entertaining format. I've always remembered one comment that he made, as a sort of sideways glance at his quite bitter past dispute with Joe Chamberlain which, of course, had had to be buried by the time he became leader.
EH Yes, we'll go back and talk about that in the next interview.
BERINSON Yes. But he made some comments to the effect that in speaking about this dinner, with him or his office, I apparently said there was some difficulty in selling tickets, and he made some comment to the effect that I might have been worried about that but he wasn't, because he knew that in Western Australia "Joe always has the numbers". Of course, he was talking about Joe Chamberlain, but it was a nice comment. It was just part of his general entertainment of the people there. Though they paid more than most of the political dinners in those days, they got their value.
EH And, Mr Berinson, your family, were they helping you at this stage, because the seat of Perth would have been a tough seat to win, wasn't it?
BERINSON Oh, it was very tough. We put a lot of work in. But when you say "family", my wife, as I've already indicated, was not active in politics. She went with me on occasions during the campaign where it was necessary, but there was only a handful of those, and our children, of course, were very young. In fact, they were too young to do things like even put pamphlets in letter-boxes which they did in later campaigns. But they did help me in one respect, and this was another one of the new aspects of the 1969 election.
Television was still a very new medium for campaigning in those days, and was especially important in that election because of the very effective way in which Whitlam was able to use it. From my point of view, though, I remember it as really the first occasion on which any candidates were able to develop any sort of advertising skills, so to speak, in their television presentations. I suppose, for example, you just came in straight face and head on and saying something. Now the ability of candidates to present themselves in an advertising type of framework, really started, in my recollection, in 1969, and I was one of the only, if not the only, candidate in this State to have a series of personalised election advertisements which did get away from just the straight message. That whole system, by the way, didn't last long because within a few elections television time became so expensive that it was prohibitive for individual candidates.
END OF TAPE FOUR SIDE A TAPE FOUR SIDE B BERINSON 46
BERINSON In any event I started this comment on the basis of whether my children, even at a tender age, were helping me, because I always remember very proudly one advertisement that we used in that campaign, and I was proud of the fact that I'd actually written it and not any of the advertising gurus. It had a number of people in Forrest Place being interviewed with the appearance of kerbside interview. There was a lady who was asked, "Who are you going to vote for?" She said she'd vote for Joe Berinson. They said, "Why?" and she gave some good reason about this fine fellow. Then we had Kim Beazley and they asked him why he thought people should vote for me, and he said because I'd be a very good addition among our people in Canberra. Then they switched on to Jill and Linda, my two older daughters, but they were only about six and four-and-a- half respectively, and they were asked, "Do you think people should vote for Joe Berinson?" They'd learnt it so well that they were able to say, "Yes," and "Yes," and they were asked why. They said, "Because he's our Dad." I really loved that. [laughs] It didn't have much to do with politics but that was television - political advertising. It was really the first instance I think we'd had of that over here.
EH It sounds very effective. Now, the campaign itself, what were the major issues that you were concerned with, with that election?
BERINSON There were many issues, but they were really based on the Whitlam agenda and to a great extent on the Whitlam personality. He had this agenda about the cities' social progress, social welfare; Vietnam was a hot issue in those days. The party position on that was very prominent, unlike 1969. I think public opinion on Vietnam by then, had changed very significantly, so that was a plus instead of a minus for us. But for the rest, it was the standard case of having some alternatives but, in particular, having a lot of issues on which a government that had been in office for so long was vulnerable to attack.
EH And your opponent for this election?
BERINSON It was Fred Chaney. There was one issue which we developed in Perth in particular by, the way. I think it was about the only significant local issue, and that was based on the very high inflation in housing and land costs that were then experienced at that time, and which I felt was worth emphasising because of the number of people in Perth who were being affected by it. Of course, the theoretical weakness of dealing with that was that it had nothing to do with Federal Government policies. It was really a matter that was open to the State Government to be acting on, but I think that sort of thing doesn't worry people too much in terms of the detail. If they're worried enough about an issue and it is linked with the party that's in government (and of course the Liberals were in government in the State as well at that time) then it's an issue that you can run with.
EH Now, you must admit it was a close campaign, and it must have been a fairly wearing one because it's a big electorate. How did you feel as the campaign progressed? Did you feel that you were going to win? TAPE FOUR SIDE B BERINSON 47
BERINSON Yes, I had a very positive feeling about that. Perth is a notoriously balanced seat - or was in those days. It's, of course, now one of our safest seats as the boundaries have changed to bring in a number of strong Labor areas we didn't have in those days. But it had been a seat that historically had tended to move each way, so you couldn't be too certain about it. Nonetheless, I did feel confident and I think my feelings about what was likely to happen, or the strength of my feeling about what was likely to happen, was only matched in 1975 when I developed a very strong feeling that I was going to lose.
EH Right. Now, Mr Berinson, winning the election. That must have been a very exciting night, and especially when it was close for the Labor Party anyway. You came close to actually winning the election nationally. Was there a sense of euphoria that night at the count?
BERINSON I've got to say it's a blur that night, but I think it's safe to assume that the answer to that is, yes.
EH Good. Now, the logistics of being a federal member of Parliament. How soon were you able to meet with the Labor caucus; going to Canberra; being in opposition, how did that develop? How soon did you actually take up your seat?
BERINSON Well, you take up the seat immediately it's declared, and there's a well-established system in the public service too to provide you with your facilities and so on. We met as a caucus very quickly after that, certainly within a couple of weeks, and that was my introduction to Canberra. Now that was a euphoric meeting. I think there's really a question as to why it should be euphoric when elected into opposition, but there were a lot of new faces in that caucus. There had been a big swing and people were very happy about that. More than that, even though it was premature by far, that there really was a feeling that this was the first of the two-step process of the government.
END TAPE FOUR SIDE B TAPE FIVE SIDE A BERINSON 48
A further interview with Joe Berinson recorded at his office on 18 November 1993.
EH We finished last session with the euphoria of the 1969 election. Even though Labor was defeated, WA had won six out of the nine seats, and the coalition's majority was reduced to seven in the Federal Parliament. You said that, and I'm quoting: "This was the first of a two-step process in winning government," but before continuing this period in opposition, I would like to ask you to trace some of Gough Whitlam's development as leader, and the development of the Labor platform during the 1960s; but specifically going back into that mid-1960s period. Perhaps if you could describe how active you were in the party; for example, taking on the role of acting [state] secretary in 1966.
BERINSON Having to try and recall some of the events for the record we're now preparing, I've been encouraged to look back at some of the printed party material, and most recently I've looked at the State Executive minutes over the early and mid '60s. I've frankly been surprised to be reminded of the extent to which I was active in the party in those years, and this led to my being elected to the offices of the State Executive - first as trustee and then as one or other of the vice-presidents. That must have gone on for most of the 1960s, from about '63 on, which in terms of my active participation in party matters was quite a fast progression.
In about mid-1966, Joe Chamberlain became ill. He had a kidney problem, and following earlier practice, Colin Jamieson who was then State President and a member of the Legislative Assembly, was appointed to the position of acting secretary. That was really just a matter of the officers recommending to the State Executive, and the executive agreeing. Because I was senior vice-president at that time, that led in turn to my not being acting president, but being chairman of the State Executive meetings, while Colin Jamieson was acting secretary, and I suppose that gave me a bit of extra prominence.
Joe Chamberlain's illness continued for longer than originally expected, and eventually Colin Jamieson had to indicate that his parliamentary duties would not allow him to continue as acting secretary, and I then volunteered my services. I don't believe, from memory, that there were any other takers from among the officers, so it wasn't as though there was a big competition. In any event, the officers recommended to State Executive that I should be acting secretary, and although there was a move at the meeting when that was considered to have the position made the subject of a ballot, the officers' recommendation was carried.
It was a VERY instructive time for me, and a very clear lesson in the enormous power which the position itself added to whoever was there. It helped to understand that Joe Chamberlain's influence on the party really involved a combination of his personality and the power of the position, rather than personality alone. I was quite active over that period. I found, for example, that there were many positions unfilled, especially in respect of union delegates, and I TAPE FIVE SIDE A BERINSON 49
tried with what was unfortunately only a small circle of interested people to get others on. We did get a number on as delegates in that period, and it started to change the balance, to the extent that when Joe returned to his duties and I stood against him as Federal Executive delegate, I think I only missed out by a handful of votes, whereas in previous years I would have only got a handful of votes. So it was quite a significant period.
Other things happened as well in terms of the way issues were discussed at that time. That was a time when State aid was very hot. He was strongly opposed; I was strongly in favour. Gradually, even though over this very short period, some attitudes started to be modified and people who had been reluctant to express their views in opposition to Joe Chamberlain's, just started to express them. It was an interesting period, and among other things I helped, as I understood the position, to accelerate Joe's recovery, [laughs] because he came back to work somewhat earlier than his doctors had recommended. [laughter]
EH Now how did this relate to the federal scene, and federal conferences, particularly Joe Chamberlain's relationship with Gough Whitlam, and the plan to rebuild the party platform?
BERINSON Oh, I don't think my own period as acting secretary would have had any influence on that. It was much too short to have any input in that way. Over the whole period that I recall, there was constant tension and antagonism between Gough and Joe. That continued even after Gough was elected as Leader of the Opposition, following Arthur Calwell's retirement. But that tended to tip the balance in Whitlam's favour. I don't think that Joe really got accommodated to the idea of Gough as leader until we'd won the 1972 election, and he was then dealing with the Prime Minister. From then, I've got to say, that Joe, as he had done previously when we had a State Government with which he didn't always agree, was quite unqualified in the support that he gave. His view was that if you've got a Labor Government, it's the role of the Labor Party to be supporting it. I can't imagine that some of his personal views had changed, but certainly he was unqualified in both his public position, and in the position he took within the party, whenever criticism of the Labor Government was advanced.
EH How did Gough Whitlam gather support, particularly at federal conferences, for his platform of reform, particularly in the areas of health reform, of urban development, reform in education? Who supported him and how did he gather this support - particularly when there was such strong opposition from people like Joe Chamberlain? The older guard of the party I guess it was - would that be correct?
BERINSON Not necessarily. For example, the Victorian Executive had quite young leaders, particularly with Bill Hartley as secretary, and that was the greatest thorn in his side, and led eventually, of course, to federal intervention in that State. It's difficult for me to try and judge just how Gough established a process of winning people over. Naturally he took all measures, including TAPE FIVE SIDE A BERINSON 50
personal contact, approach to branches, approach to State branches, and so on. But I would think that if I had to identify the major single measure that he took to establish his position, it was really by ignoring the party, or going over the head of the party, so to speak, straight to the public. He was able to do that because by the time he became prominent we'd moved into the television age, and he was a superb performer on television. Even if he hadn't been as good a performer as he was, he would have looked very good by comparison with Arthur Calwell, who suffered very much from the advent of television. He was not made for the television era, either in his appearance or with his voice, and his real talents were really submerged, I think, in the medium.
So we went through a period of a few years, I would say, when (led by the television influence, but then by Whitlam's acceptance by the print media) we had this constant reference whenever the Labor Party lost an election or was in some difficulty, along the lines of: "If only you had a different leader." No, that's putting it in too abstract a way. What was really being said, "If only Whitlam was leader." Of course, he was only Prime Minister for about 24 hours before people were using exactly the same phrase to suggest he was a terror. I'm exaggerating, of course, because he had a very good honeymoon period, but very shortly after the honeymoon period, people were saying much the same about him.
So Whitlam was very effective with the media, and going to the pubic. He had a very strong base in New South Wales which had gone through a period with the Labor Party in that State being the odd man out, so to speak, in Labor affairs. I'm think I'm right in saying that at the first federal conference I attended (if not the first, certainly the second) when State aid was up for discussion, New South Wales really stood apart from the whole of the rest of the party. My memory is that their six delegates voted against whatever the decision was at the time, opposing State aid, and the rest of the party voted the other way. So he had a strong base there. He had minority support in a number of other States. He had virulent opposition from Victoria, but he just came through.
EH Did you have personal observations of Gough Whitlam's relationship with Arthur Calwell then - particularly at conferences?
BERINSON Yes, but very limited. It was, I think, obvious at an early stage that Whitlam just thought that Arthur should be standing aside for him, and I think in the circumstances of the time, that was probably right. But it wasn't going to happen, and so there was, I think, a sort of competitive friction between them. But they had to work together as best they could.
EH Did Arthur Calwell express this openly?
BERINSON Not that I recall, no. EH Now, was Joe Chamberlain's opposition to Whitlam based purely on ideological grounds, such as State aid, or was there a personality difference there as well? TAPE FIVE SIDE A BERINSON 51
BERINSON I think there was a combination. They found themselves in conflict over a number of issues; State aid was one, and abortion was another. But even on Vietnam there were differences, as I remember, in the way that Whitlam expressed his opposition in the early days, as opposed, for example, to the position he took later in the '60s and as we got towards the '72 election. By then he was totally unqualified, whereas, if I remember correctly, some of his earlier statements were more understanding of the American position than the party generally, and certainly Chamberlain, would have supported. There was also quite a strong difference between them, in that Chamberlain was very attached to the existing party structure, whereas I think Whitlam must have recognised very early on, and even before the `43 faceless men' fiasco, that it just had to change if the party was ever going to get up to scratch in its attractiveness to the public, and in the policies that were just developing. It would have to get up to scratch on its own internal organisation as well. As it happened it was that internal organisation which was at the heart of Chamberlain's personal strength and influence. So even apart from what he would have thought about it on principle, so to speak, he would have had a major vested interest.
EH In The Light on the Hill there's a reference there to the post- 1967 period, after Gough was elected as leader. It refers to his reconciliation with Chamberlain. This must have been during this restructuring of the party. Apparently Gough Whitlam came over and spoke at a State conference. Do you have any recollection at all of that?
BERINSON Well, I described that as a two-part process as well. I think once Whitlam became leader of the Labor Party, Joe Chamberlain felt a need to get behind him. But even over that '67 to '69 period, and perhaps even after '69, there were tensions between them, so that the sort of reconciliation you're talking about had to take place at periodic intervals. [laughter]
EH In 1969 Mick Young took over - this must have been after the 1969 election - took over as Federal Secretary, and he actually stood against Joe Chamberlain for the position. Was Mick Young taking over the position indicative of the huge change that was taking place in the party?
BERINSON Are you talking about a point at which there was some competition between the two of them for that position?
EH Yes, yes.
BERINSON It wasn't a full-time federal position at that time. My memory is that the Federal Secretary's position only became full-time when Cyril Wyndham was appointed. EH Oh, this must have been post-Cyril Wyndham period.
TAPE FIVE SIDE A BERINSON 52
BERINSON Oh, it might have been when Cyril Wyndham resigned, and they had to find an acting secretary for some interim period. Is that what we're talking about?
EH Yes, yes.
BERINSON Well, I wouldn't have known much about that event. It happened at Federal Executive, yes, at Federal Executive, not at any meeting that I was present at. But I think you'll find that although that had some exposure as a competition between them, Joe reported to the executive here when he came back, that what had happened was, that he had simply offered his services in an acting and part-time basis because he'd been asked, and that he'd been asked mainly because he had previously been Federal Secretary, and so had some background in the position. The indication that he gave of the position, when he got back, was that there didn't seem to be anyone else available at the time, and that when Mick Young nominated at the meeting itself and there appeared to be a competition developing, Joe withdrew. I think that's the position rather than a straight-out contest. Now, whether he withdrew in the same way as he'd withdrawn from a pre-selection ballot for the Senate previously, in circumstances where I'd always felt that his announced reasons were different from his real reasons, namely that he developed the view that he wasn't going to win, I don't know.
EH Mick Young took over the job of Federal President of the party. What was his relationship with Gough Whitlam, because they were from very different backgrounds and very different educational backgrounds. Did they complement each other?
BERINSON I didn't see enough of either of them to touch that. I would have had virtually no contact with Mick at all, and my contact with Gough was extremely limited. But certainly, going on everything that happened, they worked very well together as a team.
EH Now, just going back to where we actually finished last week, how did you begin to develop your role, your parliamentary role, in the Federal Parliament?
BERINSON It was well, really just a matter of concentrating on my own interests, joining the various caucus committees that I was mainly interested in.
EH Which ones were these?
BERINSON Oh, from memory, they would have been the Economics Committee, Social Welfare and Health Committee (I think they were amalgamated) and the Foreign Affairs Committee. Now I can't remember whether I joined all of those to start with, or whether those were the ones I came to, had my main interests in, but I think those were the three. I also found myself very TAPE FIVE SIDE A BERINSON 53
interested in the nature of the Parliament as such, and I quite enjoyed observing that, and also it's procedures. That led me eventually to nominate for Speaker. I wasn't successful, and became Chairman of Committees for a short time. I suppose that really all that happened in respect of my main interests was that I developed my earlier interests further.
EH Was there any help, in terms of learning the procedures, the induction into the Parliament? Did anyone take you under their wing or anything like that, to support you at all, or was it a matter of just finding out for yourself?
BERINSON No, everyone finds their own way, and I doubt whether there's any difference now.
EH And where you actually sat - did you have a permanent seat?
BERINSON Oh yes, we had permanent seats, and I sat in some quite interesting company, given later developments. I sat on the aisle in what you might regard as the second back row, except that the row behind us didn't come right around, so that it was almost the back row. Lionel Bowen sat next to me, and Paul Keating sat next to him. Both of those were very close to each other, from new South Wales. They were in the party machine up there, and that's an organisation that has had a life of its own and is certainly very interesting. So I suppose I would have had more to do with those two than most others, even though it took me a long time to realise, you know, the nature of the beast.
EH Was the nature of the beast the New South Wales Right?
BERINSON Exactly, exactly. See, over here, we'd had a funny sort of machine running, but it was really a Chamberlain machine. The people who supported him would sometimes loosely be called the Left, but there was no Right. There wasn't even a faction in those days, it was just a majority. The New South Wales people came in and, although it took me even a couple of years to understand what was going on, they were so used to machine wheeling and dealing, that it was just an eye-opener. In particular it was a lesson in how you don't necessarily stay with, or support, people you're agreeing with if there's some advantage to be gained from temporary alliances on particular issues with others. It was very instructive. It taught me a lot about the nature of the federation actually, because of the ability of the New South Wales people from a strong Right party machine to, on occasions, just do deals with their Victorian counterparts with a strong Left party machine.
EH Is there an example of that?
BERINSON Oh, it mainly came through in the party ballots. No, I wouldn't be able to go beyond that. There wasn't all that much policy formulation where that would throw up. But it did have an effect on me because I'd gone into the TAPE FIVE SIDE A BERINSON 54
Parliament as quite a strong centralist with the sort of naïve view that all Australians are Australians, and there's not much difference between the States or the regions.
EH Yes, I suppose I was just wondering if there was a point where the New South Wales Right could have possibly been aligned with Bill Hartley, and the Victorian Left, because that would seem quite extraordinary actually.
BERINSON All I saw was, within the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party, I don't think they would have ever reached the point of really being able to accommodate Bill Hartley - or want to.
EH No, couldn't go that far in terms of trade offs.
BERINSON No, no.
EH When did you give your maiden speech?
BERINSON I don't know. I'd have to look in Hansard on that. In fact, I don't think I've ever looked at it again, but my memory is that I did talk about the virtues of centralism. That was before I was cured of it. I often made the point later, especially given my State political background later, that I've always regarded it as important that I was cured of my enthusiasm for centralism while I was in Canberra. It wasn't a reflection of the different circumstances I saw when I became a State member.
EH And how strong were your centralist views at this point, and how had they developed?
BERINSON Oh pretty strong, and it was really on an Australian national basis, on the apparent efficiency advantages of a single and centralised authority, rather than the fragmentation between so many different authorities and parliaments. It was probably also influenced by a sort of traditional Labor view, based on early and quite defeatist approaches to the way that society might be changed, namely, that if you've got to win government in six separate States and hold it for any length of time, your chances of implementing and maintaining the sort of reforms that you'd like, are much less than if you've only got to win once at the centre, and just stay there a while. I may have been influenced by that - I don't particularly remember the various factors. I just knew that I was quite an enthusiastic supporter of Gough's view in that respect. He was a great centralist and, of course, still is today. He's a bit like me, finding it difficult to change his views after he's held them for 25 or 30 years.
EH Now life in the party room, in the federal party room, were there alliances there, and did you align yourself with any particular group as time went on? TAPE FIVE SIDE A BERINSON 55
BERINSON This was all pre-faction days in any formal sense. I don't think, no I'm sure, that there were no formal factions even by the time I lost my seat. I have the impression "the Left" would have been regularly meeting. They would have quite a large number in proportion, though not a majority of the Caucus. I don't think that other groups met in any organised way. If they did I certainly wasn't a part of it. I tended to maintain much the sort of position that I had in the State party, and that was just expressing my own views on a subject by subject basis; so that sometimes I could well be on the other side to people who I'd be agreeing with in most instances. In current sort of terminology though, I would, on most questions, be aligned with people who today would be called the Right, or the Centre, I suppose. But it's difficult to generalise, given the absence of that sort of defining system which the factions provided.
One of the things that I always resisted was the view that the Left is always progressive, and the Right conservative. I found the Left VERY conservative on a number of issues. I suppose the clearest example is their attitude to the party's own organisation, but even in political issues of social welfare, foreign affairs, as well, I found them very conservative in the sense of having taken a position, they didn't seem able to think their way beyond it.
EH In terms of the people that you were most likely to identify with as sympathetic to your point, who would they have been in the '69 to '72 period?
BERINSON Well, Gough Whitlam, I suppose, primarily. Over here, Kim Beazley [senior] seemed to represent most of the things that I'd be wanting to support and, in fact, by about that stage Kim, after having effectively dropped out of party machine politics for a while, had come back in a quite active way into the State Executive and State conferences. He became an officer of the State Executive in the late '60s, at the same time as I was. I was certainly attracted to his general view of life, and his approach and policies and so on; and, of course, there were a number of others as the time just passed there.
EH Was the party fully supportive of Gough as leader at this stage?
BERINSON Are we talking about the '69 to '72 period?
EH Yes, '69 to '72 period.
BERINSON I know I should remember this more clearly, and I don't, but I've got a feeling that his position was actually challenged at one stage. Didn't Jim Cairns stand against him?
EH Jim Cairns, yes, yes, I think so.
TAPE FIVE SIDE A BERINSON 56
BERINSON I think that's right, and that was part of the internal tensions at the time. I'm sure it was very important at the time, but the reasons for that challenge escape me. One impression I've had - well one memory I have - is that the Left had approached Kim Beazley to stand against him, and I'm reasonably sure that if Kim had stood against him, he would have won. But in the event, Cairns stood against him and lost. I think the margin there was fairly comfortable, but again, I can't remember; whether that was on Vietnam, or party organisation, or just Gough's emerging....
END OF TAPE FIVE SIDE A TAPE FIVE SIDE B BERINSON 57
EH You're smiling there. There's a very wry smile on your face.
BERINSON I'm just trying to find a word short of dictatorial to add to tendencies.
EH I think Napoleonic has been used. [laughter]
BERINSON Napoleonic is helpful, but perhaps determined - perhaps determined might fit the bill. Yes, I can't remember which of those led to that. But, of course, he survived, and each time he survived a challenge like that, or a problem such as he'd had with the Federal Executive when he went away from the meetings, calling them the `twelve witless men', his position was actually strengthened. That also was a reflection of the delight that the media took in seeing him roll the establishment.
EH Did you take over opposition portfolios at all?
BERINSON No, I was never in the shadow ministry.
EH Question time in the Parliament - did you actively participate? How were you part of the organisation for question time, and being involved in that early on?
BERINSON It was only really organised, and there would have to be some special issue up before that came into operation. Most of the time I'd sort of just jumped for the call when I could get it. I suppose, although I've never looked back on that, I would have just had my quota of questions, and some of them attracted interest and most didn't.
EH The Vietnam protest and the moratoriums were taking off from 1969. I think the first big moratorium was in 1970.
BERINSON As late as that, was it?
EH I think for that one there were a couple of thousand people came out Australia-wide, but it was biggest in Melbourne.
BERINSON Yes.
EH Did you have any role in that at all?
BERINSON No, I didn't. I've got to say that I really went with the party, rather than had any particular role in it. I didn't join any moratorium march, for example, and it was one of the situations where I was really prepared to take a lead from others, rather than develop any particular view of my own. I think, in the early days, I'd certainly been much less inclined to be critical of the American intervention than the party generally was, and that probably reflected a TAPE FIVE SIDE B BERINSON 58
combination of my pro-Americanism on the one hand, and my anti-communism on the other, and it didn't really develop much from that. I just found almost everything about it went wrong, and myself without an ability to add anything to the general party position.
EH In terms of the influence on the party, the protests were starting to build up at a time when the Americans were really considering withdrawing from Vietnam, and there followed on the American protest movement at the same time. What were the discussions that were going on within the Labor Party? Was the party generally taking a position similar to the one you've described?
BERINSON Oh well, there were a range of reactions. There were people in the party who were doing practically nothing else - Jim Cairns at the national level, John Wheeldon in Western Australia. But I think certainly by the late '60s, it was only a matter of degree. There was no reservation, I think, about the party's general approach, so it was just a matter of how active particular people would be on it. No, I think, certainly by the time we came to 1972, we could have hardly been more unreserved in our opposition and in giving the clearest possible indication of what would happen.
EH Now, I'd like to just follow up a bit more of this opposition period, and ask you for your assessment, first on the Gorton Government, and then the McMahon.
BERINSON I don't remember any stage over the three-year period, irrespective of who was the leader at the time, when you could discern a feeling of confidence in the government side, or any lack of confidence on our side. There really was an impression growing in both government and opposition that we were headed for a change. Of course, when it did come, it wasn't with a landslide, and you've got to wonder whether the Liberals at that time, hadn't perhaps partly talked themselves into defeat, or had contributed to it anyway with ineffectual leadership. But certainly that was the feeling at the parliamentary level. I'm sure that was contributed to enormously by Whitlam's dominance of the Parliament and, of course, there were also some very effective other members on our side. I think Kim Beazley was one in his area. There were a range of spokesmen who were developing a real ability to attract attention to what they were saying and some respect for their views. No doubt, however, Whitlam was the dominant individual in the whole Parliament, and I think that impression, spread by the press gallery to Australia, was extremely helpful to us.
EH Any personal assessment of Gorton that you would like to make?
BERINSON No, not really. He seemed a decent enough man, but not equipped for the job.
TAPE FIVE SIDE B BERINSON 59
EH Now of the other Labor spokespersons that Whitlam had gathered around him, who were the most influential there?
BERINSON Now in what sense to you mean influential - within the....?
EH Well, influential within the Parliament perhaps first, and then perhaps, we could look at influential within the party?
BERINSON I'm going to find that a bit difficult; partly that was because some would be influential on what we'd now call a factional basis. Lionel Murphy was developing a lot of influence, both because of his position with what I'd call the left group in Caucus, and because of the way he was pushing his role as Leader of the Opposition in the Senate. That carried with him, I think, a number of senators who may not have been all that supportive of him on individual policy questions. Sad to say, I don't really recall any other impressive personalities. I've mentioned Kim Beazley, he had some influence there, but there were certainly many others, and I can't put them into any pecking order [laughs] when I try to think back that far.
EH Yes, just staying with Lionel Murphy perhaps. Was he developing the reform measures that he was to subsequently to implement as Attorney General, at that stage? Was that discussed in detail?
BERINSON Not that I recall. His main push was in terms of use of the Senate. That happened to be a course that I did not agree with, so that correspondingly I wasn't all that impressed. Nonetheless, he had his way, and I think it came back to `bite us on the bum' as the saying goes, in later years.
EH Why was this the case?
BERINSON Well, the outstanding example was the decision to oppose the budget in opposition. We had not previously done that, and even though it tended to get submerged in the emotion of the dismissal, there was really no rational basis any longer for saying that it was disgraceful to use the majority in the Senate in that way when we'd proposed it ourselves. There are other examples though. They're probably all very good from a democratic point of view, and I'm referring here to questions like the development of the Senate committee system into a much more formal framework than it had previously had, but that also certainly gave Labor governments a lot of pain in later times. I suppose I was sort of begrudging of the development at that time, not so much for that reason, but it was hard to avoid an impression of a certain element of self- aggrandisement in what Lionel was doing in those days.
EH Yes, this is quite off the track, but it was reported in the Australian Jewish News after the '69 election that there were three Jewish parliamentarians now in the Federal Parliament, yourself, Barry Cohen, and Moss TAPE FIVE SIDE B BERINSON 60
Cass.5 Did you associate together? Was there a Jewish Labor Party as such that supported each other?
BERINSON No. No, not at all. Our backgrounds had been very different. I suppose I associated more with Barry than with Moss, but now you raise it, I suppose on the other hand it's true to say that we did have something in common, being Jewish, and that might have given us a bit more contact than we otherwise would have had. Moss, of course, was in the Left group and, in fact, quite a prominent member of it, and with a range of views that would have been quite different from my own in a number of respects. So yes, the fact that we were all Jewish may have given us a bit of an additional reason for some contact, and I think all three of us were very friendly with each other. But we didn't have anything along the line of the Negro Caucus in Congress, for example.
There was another member whose status in terms of being Jewish was always a bit obscure to me, but he certainly came from a Jewish family, and that was Dick Klugman.
EH I sensed that there was a sense of pride in reporting that in the Jewish News, that there were three Jewish members of Parliament. Did you have that sense from the Jewish community here when you were elected?
BERINSON I don't think so. I mean people wished me well, but I don't think that they really saw that as a Jewish question.
EH Was there a Jewish Left in a way, that someone like Moss Cass would have represented, particularly in Victoria?
BERINSON Victoria had a much more politically active Jewish community than anything I've ever seen over here. The community in Western Australia, certainly in all my adult life, has been completely apolitical in terms of Australian politics. It has been politically active on specific Jewish questions. For example, it was active very early after the Second War on the question of German migration. It has always been very strongly pro-Israel, and at any time that there seemed some point to making political representations, it would have. But other than that, it's been remarkably apolitical. The further we got away from the Second War as well, the further we would have left behind us what I think was probably a majority pro-Labor sentiment, to become predominantly a conservative sentiment.
EH And this would have been different from the more cohesive Jewish Left in say, Melbourne?
BERINSON Yes. I don't think it was all that big, for example, but it was an organisation. They had a committee, I think it was called the Committee Against
5Australian Jewish News, TAPE FIVE SIDE B BERINSON 61
Racial Discrimination and Anti-Semitism - some such name as that. Senator Sam Cohen was prominent in that, and I think Moss Cass would have been. They are the well-known community leaders there, but I think.... well, no, I'll put it the other way; I doubt whether their numbers would have ever been substantial. At the same time, they were organised and on a explicitly political ideological basis. We saw nothing like that here, and I don't think there was anything like that in Sydney either.
EH When we meet next time there will be the true euphoria of the 1972 election, and that's perhaps where we'll start next time.
END OF TAPE FIVE SIDE B TAPE SIX SIDE A BERINSON 62
EH This is an interview with Joe Berinson recorded on 2 December 1993.
Joe, to start off today could I just ask you for your overview of the 1969-72 period in opposition: how you developed your role as a parliamentarian, your involvement in the committee system and how it was working, those sorts of issues.
BERINSON I think it's fair to say that over that whole period, '69-'72, it was the opposition on the attack and the government in retreat. During that period Gorton was removed by his own party whilst still Prime Minister. McMahon was a weak parliamentary figure, and also I think politically weak as a public figure. As against that, we had the very prominent and effective leadership of Gough Whitlam on our side, and also in the nature of things, an increasing number of issues that come to work against any government that's been there for a length of time.
The committee system was active within the caucus, and I would think more effective than it came to be when we were in government. That's also in the nature of things.
EH Why was that?
BERINSON In government most of your policies and initiatives by far start with the Cabinet. By the time they had come to caucus, the issues will have very frequently had a public airing and to change anything involves a repudiation of your own leaders. So it's just not done. It's not to say that the committees didn't have any influence, but I think on the whole you would certainly regard their influence when we were in government as less than their policy-making influence in opposition, when there was still the job of formulating policy for elections and for attacks on the government to be done.
The other thing, of course, is that when you're in government, your ministers have such an enormous apparatus at their disposal, it's quite difficult to argue against them in the way that you can when your leaders are shadow ministers without that support.
EH Was the committee system influential in the development of the party platform for 1972?
BERINSON I don't think that the caucus committee system as such was, but there would have been a number of members of the federal caucus who were at the federal conference and I think you do get a bit of spill-over effect from that.
EH I don't know whether you perhaps want to talk about the conference, the Surfers Paradise conference now, or leave that till later. TAPE SIX SIDE A BERINSON 63
BERINSON Well perhaps we could leave that till later. I'd like to refresh my memory on some of the details.
EH Good, good. Now just getting back to your own electorate, what was the sort of range of requests that you had from your own electorate, and what were the expectations that you needed to meet in terms of being a parliamentarian in Canberra?
BERINSON It's a very common comment and even complaint by members of Parliament that they end up being untrained social workers. Certainly over that period, as I recall it, there was surprisingly little electorate contact looking to have my support on any major policy issue. It really came down in the main, by far, to personal and family difficulties people were asking me to help with. In my own case, although it's difficult to get down to detail this far from the event, I would say that at least half of the approaches through my office were upon immigration matters. That was a reflection of the fact that while we've got a high proportion of migrants everywhere in Australia, Perth always has had a particular concentration of them.
Over this period there were significant changes going on. The Liberal Government at that time, and if I remember correctly Don Chipp may have been immigration minister and played some role in it, were becoming much more sympathetic in their approach to Asian and Eurasian migrants. It was during that period, for example, that we had a very large influx of Burmese Eurasians, and a lot of them ended up in Perth. When they did, their first concern very often was to try and help relatives and friends who had still been unable to get approval, and so there was a lot of pressure of that kind.
I think it's again a common experience among parliamentarians that immigration applications can be very frustrating. You're bound to try and help, and in most cases from a family point of view there was every reason to try and encourage approval for the people you were being approached about. But in the end there was a huge bureaucratic process dealing with all of these things, so that applications kept getting shunted from one point to another. You would have to be very, very discriminating in the type and the number of cases that you took to a minister, otherwise you'd quickly wear out your welcome and you'd just get a standard form refusal.
The wins were very occasional, and to be honest about it most of the successes, as they may have been perceived by your constituents, were really approvals that would have happened anyway, given more time. On the other hand there was the occasional 'victory', and that gave you some encouragement to keep doing your best on what you felt were the most pressing or most deserving cases.
EH In 1971 you received your law degree, you also topped the year, that graduation year. How had you been managing to study through these years? TAPE SIX SIDE A BERINSON 64
BERINSON Well, I had completed the first three years of the law course by the time of the election in 1969, although come to think of it I may have had to defer the exams until January or February in 1970. That left me with one year to finish and that certainly involved a bit of a strenuous campaign. I was helped very much by one of my fellow students, Jim Thompson, who later became my legal assistant in the Attorney General's office, by coincidence. He helped me very much with notes, and lecturers also helped by giving me permission to have their lectures taped, and I'd work off the tapes. Any time I was in Perth I would attend the lectures, but all of that in a very heavy pressure on time.
I did have one advantage and that was that the Parliamentary Library had a superb law library. I had an arrangement with the librarian who allowed me to have a key, and when the Parliament got up, which was usually at about 10.30 or 11, and the library was locked, I'd let myself in and work for several hours till two or three o'clock in the morning. So it was a bit strenuous, but we got there.
EH Had you specialised in any aspects of the law in your undergraduate years?
BERINSON No, no, I couldn't. In those days the whole course consisted of core subjects, so there might have been one choice in that final year, but otherwise it was all laid out in advance.
EH Did you have any special interest in doing the law? Was it something that you'd wanted to do for some time?
BERINSON Yes it was. I think quite soon after I qualified as a pharmacist I came to regret the choice of career, but then with marriage and family developments it really wasn't possible to do much about that for some time. I enjoyed the study of the law very much, and I enjoyed what little practise I later had.
EH Now Joe, leading up now to the 1972 campaign, how did you yourself go about communicating the reform and revitalisation of the Labor Party to the electorate in Western Australia?
BERINSON There was nothing out of the ordinary there. You just relied on your ability as a member to attract a bit of media attention on various matters. I think that probably compared with most of the other members from Western Australia I might have had a little more exposure than the average. For the rest it was matter of trying to keep in touch with the electorate in the way that every member has to do; such as keeping in touch with organisations in attending a wide range of functions; making sure that you're available to people who want to see you; trying to provide a service to them; and doing all of that the best way you can. TAPE SIX SIDE A BERINSON 65
I did have a bit of exposure during this period because by a process that I now forget, the details of which I now forget, I became a sort of West Australian representative of our health system campaign. Now that was a very big issue, the first Medicare campaign. I say a big issue, I mean a big issue leading into the 1972 election. It was one of the issues that we later went to the double dissolution on in 1974. There was a lot of interest in it. Part of that was because people were worried about the health system; the other part of the interest was engendered by the very strong antagonism of the medical profession to it. So one way or another that was an issue with which I think I became identified and it gave me quite a lot of exposure and contact I wouldn't otherwise have had.
EH Had you participated in the development of the platform and policies up until then?
BERINSON Well, only in terms of work in caucus and also for the State Executive. I stayed active in the State Executive as best I could over this period. I was also a West Australian delegate to two conferences while we were in government. As well as that I was at each of the State conferences over a period, so one way or another you just get involved in the policy process in the ordinary course of events.
EH The media and advertising campaign was seen as outstanding for the Labor Party for this '72 election. The 'It's time' message was a very strong one that seemed to work well. Whitlam's policy speech also was a long and detailed one when he launched the campaign with "Men and women of Australia...." What was your perception of the public response to Whitlam and his call to men and women of Australia, as well as the organisation of the campaign?
BERINSON I think the reception was very good and it was a mixture of positive support for the opposition and a lot of accrued antagonism to the government. As well as antagonism, lack of respect, if you like. That was linked with the fact that McMahon couldn't match Whitlam as a personality. There was the quite important issue of Vietnam at this stage, which had turned 180 from having solid public support to a situation where there was both strong opposition, but also a sense of futility about the exercise. So that was a huge change. That combined with Whitlam and the fact that the 'It's time' slogan really did reflect a public mood, meant that we were on - or certainly in Western Australia, it felt as if we were on a roller-coaster. In the end we didn't win by all that many seats, but I must say that over here it was one of only - well, three occasions that I can remember, where I just felt from start to finish that the result was going to be the way it ended.
Just to round that off, let me say that the three occasions I'm talking about were 1972, where I couldn't envisage defeat; 1975 when I couldn't envisage anything other than defeat; and 1986 in the State election when the Burke Government was up for its first re-election effort, and again there was just a feeling in the air that the government would be returned. TAPE SIX SIDE A BERINSON 66
EH Now the role of the press, the print and the television and radio journalists; were they supportive of the Labor campaign did you think?
BERINSON That's not something that I would have experienced personally. My impression of the general campaign at the leadership level was that they were supportive. I think that showed in the most unusual weight of editorial opinion ended up supporting the Labor Party.
EH Now 2nd December 1972 victory; what was it like to be a member of the Labor Party that had actually won government?
BERINSON Well, it was better than the alternative. Well naturally it was a very satisfying period. We'd been this enormous time out of office. We'd done terrible things to ourselves over that time that made the job of the coalition parties easier. Suddenly all sorts of things had come together well. The leadership was attractive; the policies were appropriate to the times and also publicly acceptable; and a really quite strong sense of solidarity in the party. Now that last issue had been very far from unqualified even over the three-year period of Whitlam's leadership of the opposition. There were still problems, but by 1972 had really determinedly been put aside in the interests of a successful campaign, and it was successful.
EH Now could you describe the process that took place in occupying the government benches? How soon did you go to Canberra? When did the caucus meet?
BERINSON Well, everything happened in a hurry. You remember that as soon as the results were clear, Whitlam had established a.... a duumvirate I think, wasn't it? Just himself and Lance Barnard. They became Minister for Everything and called the troops home, and got things under way. I think that was a two- edged sword. On the one hand it showed a terrific sense of urgency and determination to get on with the job, but on the other hand there was an element there of rushing things too much. After all if you'd been in opposition for 23 years, an extra two-and-a-half weeks while you called your caucus together to elect a government doesn't seem long to wait in the scheme of things.
Nonetheless by the time we got back to Canberra a few weeks later for the first caucus meeting and election of Cabinet, everyone was naturally very happy and the mood was very buoyant. There was a sour incident there which I've always recalled, as a mark against Lionel Murphy, and that was that in the.... Well, while everyone was being euphoric and especially the ministers who had been appointed in the caucus election, he started to make complaints about his own status. He complained that there hadn't been a triumvirate, for example, with him as one of the members. He also, if I remember correctly, started to complain about the fact that Whitlam had not listed him as number three in the pecking order of Cabinet positions. I think the Leader of the Senate would be number TAPE SIX SIDE A BERINSON 67
three and he did become number three as things settled down. But in circumstances where there were three-quarters of the caucus who hadn't been elected to the Cabinet and would have given their eye teeth to have been in it, to have someone who had been appointed to Cabinet and in a position as prominent as Leader of Senate and starting to make complaints about his status, was a sour note for me. It really jarred. Other than that it was very happy and celebratory.
EH Celebratory in what sense? How did people celebrate? [pause] Did people sing or anything like that?
BERINSON No. You have to keep all this in the context of an election that by then was several weeks behind and everyone was settling down to their electorate offices and work and so on, and they were very used to it, to being there. But there was just a good feeling about being in a position where you could arrive at decisions and something would actually follow from it other than just some criticism of the government, which is all you could do in opposition.
EH I think Gough Whitlam described his approach as a 'crash through or crash' approach to government in that early stage, in the first few weeks. Did that continue once the ministry had been elected?
BERINSON I thought it did. As a matter of fact I had always thought that this 'crash through or crash' was a description by others applied to his whole term of government. Even if it wasn't, I think it would be appropriate to do that. I personally wasn't attracted to it. I heard Whitlam say on a number of occasions that Labor governments never last long, and so while you're there you've got to do whatever can be done as quickly as possible. That didn't attract me. It seemed to me to offer up a self-fulfilling prophecy, and that if you kept doing things quickly enough, in the end you wouldn't last long.
I suppose in that context, to the extent that I was contributing to caucus, I would have been rather more conservative on a number of issues than the caucus was. In the end I think we suffered very badly from this 'crash through or crash'. It may well have been based on Whitlam's view of the history of the Labor Party up to that time, but that didn't mean it had to represent the future pattern as well. There's no better test of that than the length of time that Labor stayed in government since 1983.
EH Just going back to Lionel Murphy for a minute, was there a tension between Gough Whitlam and Lionel Murphy that lasted? Was there a competition there from two pretty strong leaders?
BERINSON I wouldn't know how to describe it. Yes, I think there was a tension. They would, on a number of occasions, take different positions. But I've got to say it's all quite vague in my memory of events now. I remember thinking at the time of Murphy's appointment to the High Court that apart from any of the TAPE SIX SIDE A BERINSON 68
good reasons that Whitlam presented in favour of that appointment at the time publicly, that he would not have been sorry to see Murphy leave the Parliament.
END OF TAPE SIX SIDE A TAPE SIX SIDE B BERINSON 69
EH Joe, in The Light on the Hill, Ross McMullen says that Whitlam - this is paraphrasing what he said - Whitlam was disappointed that you had not been elected to the first ministry. Could you comment on the election of the ministry and how it worked. You must have been disappointed yourself that you weren't elected?
BERINSON In a way I wasn't disappointed because I didn't expect to get there. Again I've got to rely on memory, but I think I'm right in saying that the whole of the Cabinet - the first Cabinet - was elected out of the shadow ministry, and so while obviously I'd like to be there, it wasn't surprising that I wasn't. Also there was a sense that there were a number of members who you could reasonably regard as old-timers among the first batch, so there ought to be opportunities within a reasonable period.
I was frankly not aware of any comment by Gough or any disappointment on his part at my not being elected then, or for that matter later. So far as I am aware he never supported me. He did keep aloof from elections, so far as I was aware. I would have liked some support from him. In fact, I had a feeling on a number of occasions that he tended to spend too much of his time generally trying to win over his opponents rather than support his supporters, if I can put it that way. Although it's got difficulties associated with it, I think there is something to be said for a leader exerting his leadership prerogatives in support of people he would prefer to have in the Cabinet, rather than simply to leave the process to the machinations of others. I think inevitably they're going to be thought of as machinations by someone, so the leader might as well be in it.
EH Was that a Labor Party tradition or that was just Gough Whitlam's approach?
BERINSON I think you have varying attitudes to it. I may be wrong. In the case of some people, maybe he did exert himself in favour of some. I was never conscious of his attempting to assist me. Maybe I felt that a bit more because I was so hopeless as a campaigner for myself as well. I found it very difficult.
EH This is also taken from Ross McMullen's book where he describes all ministers as having full Cabinet status. It was a large Cabinet of 27, but caucus was able to review Cabinet decisions. How did this actually work in practice, did it create problems?
BERINSON Well, I think it did. I think from my short experience in the Cabinet that having 26 or 27 members was far too many and that the structure involving an inner Cabinet and an outer ministry was certainly preferable.
The decision to vote for the lot was, I think, a reflection of a tendency at that time to what I would call excessive democracy. I tend rather to the view that when you've actually got executive responsibilities you need a better executive framework than a Cabinet of 27 could apply. TAPE SIX SIDE B BERINSON 70
Now I think that notion of democracy was also taken to excessive lengths [in another way,] but this is subject to my recollection proving to be right. I think that, at least initially if not throughout the term of our government, we also adopted a system which did not apply Cabinet solidarity. That was very bad because ministers could come out of Cabinet and oppose Cabinet decisions in caucus.
EH Just following up a bit on the review of Cabinet decisions by caucus, would that have even magnified that problem more if caucus was coming out against Cabinet decisions?
BERINSON Well, there's nothing wrong with caucus doing that. Of course it's made very difficult if you've got Cabinet solidarity because there's such a high proportion of the caucus [in Cabinet and they] have got so many friends and allies in the caucus. But there would have been very few occasions in any event where a caucus were really digging its heels against a position that was strongly argued for. I don't remember them. There must have been some though because I remember Whitlam on a number of occasions making either explicit or muted threats of resignation if he was to be repudiated on one issue or another. So from that I gather that there must have been some times when that looked as though it was looming.
EH How did the caucus meetings work, how often did you meet?
BERINSON Every week. Every week while Parliament was sitting.
EH And were strategies put in place at those meetings?
BERINSON Yes.
EH Looking at the achievements up until the 1974 double dissolution and just listing through the big issues that the government was looking at - urban and regional development; support for the Arts. In foreign affairs there was the recognition of China; the opposition of the United States policy in Vietnam. Social welfare changes. Changes in health, in education, in Aboriginal affairs, family law. This is just listing the really broad issues that the Whitlam Government was addressing in this first period of government. Could I ask you for your observations and the part that you were playing at this time?
BERINSON The dominant theme of the period was, of course, activity. Everything was happening on all fronts. A lot of it did have long-lasting effects, although with such a short period in government between '72 and '75 it was possible for other matters to be rolled back. I think there were some significant changes. In social welfare, for example, there was a new base put on the level of social welfare that really then led to a competition between Labor and the anti- Labor parties as to who could improve it further from that point on. There was no going back. The health scheme was defeated in the Senate and was one of the TAPE SIX SIDE B BERINSON 71
subjects of the later double dissolution. That had a lot of energy and effort invested in it, mainly by Bill Hayden at that time, as the minister.
There was another major effort made in the attempt to introduce comprehensive no-fault insurance for injury. That was also defeated in the Senate. I must say that both the health scheme and the no-fault insurance attracted me very much, and I did a lot of work on them. Much of the argument in support of the insurance issue which was eventually defeated by trade union opposition interestingly enough, even more than from the opposition from all other quarters, was that it was based on what was said to be a highly successful New Zealand pattern.
In the last few years I've seen an increasing number of references to the failure of that New Zealand scheme. Unfortunately I don't know whether it has failed or not, or whether criticisms of particular problems that have emerged within the scheme have really been highlighted as part of the various New Zealand election campaigns. It would be interesting to look back on that. Certainly our existing system could do with some improvement.
There was a huge drive on improving standards of education. That was led by Kim Beazley as Education Minister. I must say I got a lot personal satisfaction in seeing his own satisfaction at being able to do things that we'd talked about for 20 years. But there again I think at the end of the day we probably did suffer from haste as well. At one stage we found ourselves caught in a position of constantly leapfrogging claims by teachers' unions in various States, which threatened to absorb the huge amounts of extra expenditure that was being voted to education, without really producing the results that we wanted to. Nonetheless the end of that system was beneficial, I'm sure, and so was the move on free university education.
Foreign affairs was revolutionised. The withdrawal from Vietnam and the repeal of constription happened even before the caucus met. That was done by executive decision. The move to China was very significant. The change with Papua/New Guinea was very significant. I personally had some real problems with the Whitlam approach to the Middle East following the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the oil shock. I was really quite disappointed with the view that was taken on that. But all in all there were a host of good things being done.
Environment for the first time had become an issue. The Liberal Government had a Minister for Environment, but his whole department consisted of three people. That entirely changed. We had our first legislation, requiring environmental protection assessment and all of that sort of structure, established under Moss Cass.
Support for Aboriginal welfare was multiplied many times in financial terms, although there again that ended up being a quite frustrating area in terms of perceived benefits as opposed to measurable outlays.
TAPE SIX SIDE B BERINSON 72
EH The reaction to the bureaucracy to such swift change. Your observations there.
BERINSON I really wasn't in a position to observe. I think it's really only the ministers who would have been.
EH In 1973 Bob Hawke was elected as ALP President. How did he get on with Whitlam, initially anyway?
BERINSON From what I could see they got on very well. Certainly from the distance that I was observing the relationship I couldn't see any problems.
EH You've mentioned the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Bob Hawke would have seen that differently from Whitlam; would that have been the case?
BERINSON Yes, he would have been more supportive of Israel. Whitlam, unfortunately from my point of view, set out determinedly to maintain a position of what he called even-handedness. That became Australian foreign policy on the Middle East. I really despised that term from the time that it was adopted, before we adopted it ourselves, by the British.
The background is that the Israeli army was equipped with Centurion tanks - I think they were called Centurion tanks - in any event it was a British tank, in the war. As things got bad they were chronically short of spare parts and were having enormous difficulties. When they looked to Britain to supply spare parts for the tanks which Britain had sold them originally, Britain said that it was applying an even-handed embargo on the supply of arms to the Middle East, to the participants in that Middle East war. The problem with that was that it was only Israel that had British tanks, so the effect of that was very far from even-handed. As I say I came to despise that term and I didn't like it any better when we adopted it ourselves.
EH This might be the opportunity too, to talk about Bill Hartley's role in Victoria, and your view of the position that Hartley held and its influence on the party and the conflict that he had with Bob Hawke.
BERINSON Well, of course, the Middle East and Israel was part of that, but I think it was only a very small part of it. Hartley represented a sort of left faction that we wouldn't even understand today. He had the support of the Victorian Branch. Maybe I should put that the other way round and say he was reflecting the Victorian Branch. I don't know. In any event he was very extreme.
EH Could you just describe how extreme it was.
BERINSON It's difficult to put a.... Well, it's difficult for me, anyway, to be too specific. In foreign affairs, for example, it meant that anything that America did had to be wrong and that anything that countries ranging from Russia to China to TAPE SIX SIDE B BERINSON 73
Libya did, was somehow not only right in being politically correct, but somehow more moral.
In other areas ranging from - I don't know - industrial relations to practically anything you could think of, they were always out there with the closest thing to a class view of society that I think we had in Australian politics, over the period while I was acting in it. It's almost completely gone now, but it was all in terms of the employer being the enemy, for example, which is just an impossible way to proceed if you're going to get anywhere.
Somehow or another throughout the whole range of political policies that a government has to deal with, you'd find a group over there taking positions that they would always argue as being morally correct while everyone else was somehow morally inadequate. Only they knew what was the right thing for Australia. Most of them had very little connection with reality.
State aid, of course, was a favourite bugbear of theirs in that respect. If you were to take account of their views on State aid you'd have to think that the whole of Australian society would crumble if it was implemented. Of course it was implemented by a Labor government, and nothing happened to cause the society to crumble.
END TAPE SIX SIDE B TAPE SEVEN SIDE A BERINSON 74
This is a further interview with Joe Berinson recorded on 16 December 1993.
EH This morning, Joe, we're going to look at the 1974/75 period. I just wanted to start off with a quote from Graham Freudenberg in A Certain Grandeur when he described you as one of the five best speakers in the Parliament.6 What attributes do you think he was referring to when he said that?
BERINSON Well, I can't really say what he had in mind. It's a bit difficult to comment immodestly on a description like that. I think I had benefited from considerable competitive debating experience before I went into Parliament and particularly my own approach to that. It involved a combination of speaking techniques, but also of careful preparation. I was very reluctant to speak in the Parliament on any matter that I hadn't had the opportunity to get to grips with. Preferably I restricted myself to speaking on matters that I had properly researched so that it wasn't just a matter of sounding off. I tried to have some real content. As to style, well I think I did have a good public speaking style but I'd be the last one to be in a position to analyse that.
EH Joe, the 1974 election. The pressure for this election had been mounting. Did it come as any surprise that you would be forced to an election after 18 months?
BERINSON I think it did. Although I wasn't in any inner circle that was involved in making the decision, I've always had the impression that the decision was arrived at fairly suddenly. Certainly there wasn't the sort of discussion about the possibilities that preceded in 1975, when the second threat to withhold Supply arose.
The actual timing certainly caught me by surprise. As it happened I was in the middle of a speech in the House of Representatives, lauding my own role in securing the government's agreement to what later developed into the Forrest Chase development, when Gough Whitlam came into the chamber and asked for leave to interrupt me to make an important statement. Well, of course, I sat down and leave was given. Then he made the statement that we were going to an election. After that the story I had to tell about Forrest Place, which I'd thought was rather a good story when I started, was quite difficult to complete.
EH How hard was this campaign? Were the issues sort of the problems of economic management versus the program for reform?
BERINSON I've only got vague recollections of that to tell you the truth. Just because of the circumstances - everything happened very quickly - so that it was a very rushed campaign, with limited planning. Just a matter of doing your best. There was very little central direction, and virtually no funds, or at least none
6Graham Freudenberg, A Certain Grandeur: Gough Whitlam in Politics, Melbourne, Sun Books, 1978, p. TAPE SEVEN SIDE A BERINSON 75
that came my way. Surprisingly we ended up doing better in this State than we'd done in 1972, while in the rest of the country votes slipped away.
I think I'm right also in remembering that that was the election of the big farmers' demonstration in Forrest Place. I was there as a spectator only. I thought even then that this hugely excessive and violent demonstration did promise to be counter-productive to the demonstrators and favourable to the government. I think later that commentators came to the same view, that there had been a reaction to that sort of outburst by the public, and that helped us through.
EH Could this have been a bit of the sort of fair go attitude that the election had only....
BERINSON It could have been, I really don't know. In my own position it was all quite strange because with the rushed circumstances and the absence of really local issues, it was a matter of being washed along by the tide rather than feeling you were in a position to do a great deal.
I did again, at that election, run a fairly substantial personal television advertising campaign. That again I think stood me in good stead - it was the last time it did, but certainly we had a very favourable result in Perth compared to the rest of the country.
EH When the government reconvened after '74, was there a sense that you would now get your three years, or was the Senate still a concern in people's minds?
BERINSON In the immediate aftermath of the election I don't think anyone thought about that. You just had this huge release of pressure and relief at the favourable result. Before you know what's on, you're back to your ordinary pressures with caucus selection of Cabinet, policy differences and business as usual. I don't think I was conscious of worrying about the continuing threat from the Senate, but that's not to say that Whitlam and senior ministers weren't, I wouldn't know.
EH Yes. In 1974 in the caucus, it's reported that you challenged the Speaker, James Cope.7 Is that correct?
BERINSON I don't think it is.
EH I'll just put a reference next to that, because that was from Freudenberg8 again. BERINSON Is the comment that I nominated against him.
7 Hon. James Francis Cope, Speaker, House of Representatives, 1973-75.
8Freudenberg, op. cit., p. TAPE SEVEN SIDE A BERINSON 76
EH Yes.
BERINSON No, no, that's not right. I think there's confusion there. After the 1974 election I nominated for Cabinet. I think I either lost by one vote for the final position, or tied for the final position and then lost on the countback. In any event I was the first unsuccessful candidate, if I can put it that way.
What the comment about the Speaker might refer to, is the fact that when Jim Cope was effectively forced to resign by Whitlam leading a move on the floor of the House to reject one of his rulings, I nominated for Speaker. That was against.... I forget his first name. So I nominated for Speaker against Gordon Scholes who was then Chairman of Committees.9 I thought at the time that I would have a reasonable chance at that, but Gordon won quite comfortably. I think he was probably helped in that by the fact that when the vote against Scholes in the House took place, he actually walked out of the chamber and abstained. That was the nearest to an expression of support for Jim Cope that he could reasonably have taken. I think that helped him. In any event he was elected Speaker and I was then elected Chairman of Committees, but Jim Cope wasn't in the ballot.
EH Soon after the government reconvening there was an historic joint sitting of the House of Representatives, historic in the sense that it was the first one that had occurred. Could I ask you to describe the atmosphere and the process that the Parliament underwent for that?
BERINSON Oh well, everyone was preening themselves, not so much because it was an historic joint sitting, but because it was going to be televised. The whole proceedings were built around that. Instead of speaking from your seat they set up a lectern to the right and left of the Speaker so that people could come forward. Everything was done for the convenience of the television cameras, as most political activity is.
One result of that was that there was a lot of jockeying for position to get in the team of speakers. As it happened I didn't apply and I wasn't considering speaking, but the Prime Minister asked me to speak on the Health Insurance Bill, no doubt because I'd been very active on it in other ways. So I ended up as one of the preeners and put on a performance. I think actually on the day the drama was really overtaken by the fact that we just had an unusual platform on which to perform. Some of the more historically-minded of the members passed around the orders of the day for everyone, including members on the other side, to sign, so there was a great deal of camaraderie. While people were abusing each other with great relish for the camera, they were signing each other's order of the day so that they'd have the autographed copies to look at in future.
9 Hon Gordon Scholes, Speaker, House of Representatives, 1975-76, Deputy Speaker and Chairman of Committees 1973-75.
TAPE SEVEN SIDE A BERINSON 77
EH So there wasn't the bitterness that one would have expected on that occasion between....
BERINSON There's rarely real bitterness in the Parliament. I don't remember anything bitter on that day. I think the winners were pleased and the losers were a bit sorry, but just prepared to bide their time for the next opportunity.
EH And the reaction to getting the Health Insurance Bill through and Medicare in place?
BERINSON I think that was very satisfying, particularly to Bill Hayden who had the responsibility of it. It was also, I'm sure, very satisfying to the Prime Minister who made that a major plank of the government's programs. Of course, as with many things, the theory was better than the result. Conversely the terrible fears the medical profession were expressing came in due course to be seen as unwarranted.
EH Joe, when you say that the theory didn't live up to the result, in what way?
BERINSON [pause] I think the point has often been made that the problem with Medibank is that it described itself as a health scheme, but it was really a health-funding scheme. That left a lot of the real problem, which is the health care problem, unattended.
EH Can I ask you now about your role as Chairman of Committees? You were deputy chair from 1973 to 1975, is that correct? No, it couldn't possibly be.
BERINSON Yes, that's right.
EH Is that right?
BERINSON There are a group of deputy chairman, about half a dozen. It's not a very onerous role, but I enjoyed chairing the committees to the extent that I had a turn. But it's a fairly peripheral role. When I was elected Chairman of Committees in, I think, '74, or it may have been early '75, I don't remember the exact date. That is a different situation because the Chairman of Committees relieves the Speaker much more often than a deputy chairman would. Not only that but the Chairman of Committees will normally take most of the running in the chairing of the committee stages. The deputy chairmen are called on for relief as required.
So that can be quite an interesting position. I certainly found it interesting. I enjoyed acting as Speaker from time to time. I also took the whole of the running, TAPE SEVEN SIDE A BERINSON 78
or virtually the whole of the running, on a huge committee we had, with the Family Law Bill.
EH Did you steer that through the House of Representatives?
BERINSON Yes. That really had to be taken by one chairman because there were so many complications with the range of issues covered by the Bill and the number of amendments that were coming in from all sides, that it was important to keep a constant thread going. So that was a major one.
It nearly gave me an opportunity to have a little niche in the history with a casting vote. As the tellers were counting at a very crucial stage of the debate, I thought we were shaping up for equal numbers, but as it happened there was a majority of one for the government apparently. So I was deprived of that extra little contribution to Who's Who.
EH You were also a member of the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence. What did this involve?
BERINSON Just a general review of the areas covered. It was not a committee that travelled, for example, as I think subsequent committees have, and as I think they should. It was really a matter of just being on a committee that convened from time to time as issues arose. I don't believe that in my time on the committee there were any significant reports or recommendations that came out. There were no formal inquiries. It was a matter of the committee sitting as and when an issue arose. We did have a series of meetings around the time of the 1973 oil crisis. That did provide a better background into the problem than members would get without the ability to have that concentrated attention.
EH Did the Timor situation come to your attention on that committee?
BERINSON I don't think that arose at the time that I was on the committee and certainly I don't recall it.
EH Could I ask you just for your general comments on the parliamentary committee system and how you felt it worked?
BERINSON It was a bit of a mixture. It was certainly worth having from an educational point of view. The select committee system did provide the opportunity for very concentrated attention to different matters.
I think the first select committee I was on, perhaps the only one, was on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. I must say that was very educational. I'd been associated with the scheme as a pharmacist and I thought I knew something about it, but you quickly learned that you didn't really. That was also a very instructive experience because in the early stages it's very natural, I think, for TAPE SEVEN SIDE A BERINSON 79
committees to be disproportionately influenced by the views of the public servants who are dealing with the matter. They were speaking with great confidence and certainty about the line they were pushing. That committee provided an early example to me of the fact that although they were certain they were wrong, in fact the sort of evidence that was produced in submissions was very persuasive, and did indicate that a lot of the views that they'd been acting on were mistaken.
EH Can I ask you just to give some examples of those views?
BERINSON No, I couldn't possibly remember them. I can only, in the vaguest way, recall a specific example, which was a submission which the pharmacists had commissioned from some economists. They produced a sort of economic analysis that behind the scenes the bureaucrats simply mocked, but in the end couldn't answer. That became quite a helpful contribution to the committee's understanding of the relevant issues.
EH At the 1974 election, four women Labor members entered the Parliament. Did it start to make a difference to the Parliament having more women there? Was there a difference?
BERINSON I don't recall a difference.
EH The other question I just wanted to ask you about, women's issues in general, was the role of the Women's Electoral Lobby. Had you any experience of that?
BERINSON I was in my early days in the Parliament as WEL got under way. I had an interesting experience with them leading up to the 1974 election, which was, I think, the first occasion which they reached the point of getting round to interview and lobby all members, perhaps even all candidates. I think it may have been all candidates, because the aim of the exercise was to produce a sort of WEL report card as a guide to women voters, or voters interested in women's issues.
I probably remember that because I didn't do too well. They only gave me four out of 10 in their report card. That was one of the worst results of any candidate.
EH Do you know why you didn't do so well? [laughs]
BERINSON I don't know, but I've always consoled myself with the thought that that was the election where I got the best result of my whole career.
EH [laughs] I'm trying not to laugh out loud. [laughs]
Now was it true, after this election, that really the '74 election changed nothing in terms of the opposition's determination to block legislation. Did that become obvious soon on into the period? TAPE SEVEN SIDE A BERINSON 80
BERINSON Well, I think that's right. The fact that they'd lost the election didn't lead them to change their pre-election approach. Frankly I don't think there was any reason why they should. It wasn't a rebuke to them for their former opposition, it was just telling them people didn't think they were good enough to take over yet.
EH When did the government - or did the government start to feel under siege from the opposition?
BERINSON I couldn't put a time on it. Once the Khemlani affair started it never went away. There was always a new aspect of it to cause some harassment to the government. I am sure that must have been a huge distraction to the government at that time. Of course I wasn't in the Cabinet so I couldn't say to what extent that functioned, but it just must have.
EH Could we go on and just talk a bit about Cabinet changes and the role of caucus. Jim Cairns replaced Frank Crean as Treasurer, and then the loans affair started to develop. Could I ask you to comment on Jim Cairns' role as Treasurer, and then as it evolved?
BERINSON I could never get a feel for what he was really proposing as Treasurer. He was one of very few members with an extensive academic background in economics. The theory was that you could look to him for some economic guidance. I just had the impression that he was rather hopelessly confusing his economic and political views, as a result of which I never discerned a real pattern emerging from his role in the Treasury.
At least with Frank Crean you knew that he thought; for example, that there was a need for more discipline in the running of the economy than the government was applying. He wasn't able to achieve that, but at least he thought it should be pursued. I didn't even get that much out of Jim Cairns, and I had the feeling that he sort of dealt with the economy as a secondary issue to the political needs arising from unemployment, for example, than as something that had a quite....
END OF TAPE SEVEN SIDE A TAPE SEVEN SIDE B BERINSON 81
EH We were just cut off there at the end.
BERINSON He saw the economic management as being secondary to the political problems of unemployment, rather than us having a fundamental role to play in resolving the issue.
EH How difficult did this become in caucus for caucus to evaluate what was happening and the debate that ensued?
BERINSON Well, caucus doesn't evaluate things like that. It is one of the weaknesses of the system and later I found in State Cabinet a weakness there. There's very rarely a time where either caucus or Cabinet will sit back and evaluate broad approaches. You're nearly always dealing with specific issues that have to be resolved there and then. Other broader matters are sent off to committees, may or may not return, or simply die where they're sent. I don't think that you can really talk in terms of caucus collectively thinking, or discussing the economy, unfortunately. It doesn't work like that.
EH Was there a concern expressed between members at all?
BERINSON I really don't remember the environment at that time, but in general when things are going bad, when you've got, as we had, high inflation, high unemployment. The viability of industries coming into question following the first tentative moves to reduce tariffs and so on, of course there's concern, but it's largely inwardly directed at what's happening to individual members and the circumstances of their individual electorates.
EH Now the loans affair, as it developed. It was beginning to have a devastating effect on the government. Were members of caucus able to keep some sort of tag on what was happening?
BERINSON I don't think so. I think we would have followed it as much from press reports, or periodic statements in the Parliament, answers to questions and so on, as anything else. Again, from memory, there was never anything in the nature of a comprehensive caucus discussion on the loans affair. In my few months in federal Cabinet I don't remember any discussion on that, although in the latter case I don't suppose it would have been expected as it was largely over by the time I got there.
EH Would this have been similarly.... you know, controversial appointments like Murphy's appointment to the High Court. That wouldn't have been discussed. Would that have been discussed?
BERINSON By caucus?
EH Yes. TAPE SEVEN SIDE B BERINSON 82
BERINSON Oh, certainly not. I had some limited prior knowledge of it because the decision about his appointment was taken within a day or so of a federal conference, which I think was at Terrigal; if not it was somewhere in Queensland. John Button just approached me to discuss that generally. He'd apparently been asked for his view and he discussed it with me. But there was certainly no caucus discussion of the appointment and I wouldn't know whether it was discussed in Cabinet or whether it was just regarded as a prerogative of the Prime Minister and/or the Attorney General to determine. I think it should have gone to Cabinet, and the odds are that it did, simply because the appointment of any High Court judge is important enough to require that level of consultation. But it certainly wouldn't have gone to caucus. No appointment of a judge went to caucus. I wouldn't expect it to.
EH So I suppose really the general question that I'm asking you is the influence that caucus has; how much influence do you feel that it had at this time?
BERINSON It does have influence, but on limited and specific questions. I can remember a revolt on an issue I didn't agree with, by the way, to do with gold tax. I don't know what stage the discussion had reached but we may have been at the point where the government was intending to impose a gold tax. I would agree with that. However, Fred Collard, whose electorate was Kalgoorlie and was closely associated with it, gave a very impassioned speech to caucus and moved to oppose it. Caucus on the spot went along with him. I'm sure that's a process that happened many times. Now that was a highly individual issue and there would have been as many people voting because Fred Collard was one of their mates as on the basis that we shouldn't have a gold tax. Since I've never understood the argument against a gold tax, I think they must all have been friends.
Other issues would be more broadly based. They might, for example, be seen to have some detrimental effect on the trade union movement, and there were always advocates of the union position to be concerned about that.
EH Now when Bill Hayden took over from Cairns as Treasurer, was this giving new life to the government? Did people feel that this was a turning point?
BERINSON I don't know what the general view was, it was certainly my view. He encouraged some confidence that there was someone there who both had the capacity to make decisions on the merits and also the strength to see them through. I had great respect for Bill Hayden generally, but certainly in his position as Treasurer I think he showed just what the potential had been if only we'd had better appointments starting in 1972. I think the whole history of the Labor Government in that period would have been different if Hayden had been appointed Treasurer in '72 rather than '75. That really wasn't on the cards TAPE SEVEN SIDE B BERINSON 83
because he was quite a junior member of the shadow ministry. I am sure that a different approach to the Treasurer's position, as he showed he was capable of in '75, would have really changed the whole complexion of that government.
EH Was the faction system in place at this stage?
BERINSON There was no formal faction system. In fact I found it very difficult to work out just what was going on. Some States had well-established factions. New South Wales in particular had a right wing, which I don't think was reflected in the position of any of the other States. There seemed to be a left wing nearly everywhere you looked, but for the rest it was the New South Wales right wingers on the other side, and then quite a big number of people in the middle who would have been uncommitted and acting as individuals.
EH Was the New South Wales Right using its numbers in caucus to elect members to Cabinet?
BERINSON I never quite worked out how they operated. I think we went through a period where it wasn't so much the New South Wales right wing that was doing things, but the New South Wales members collectively doing things, especially in consultation with Victorian members acting collectively.
I remember being struck at the number of occasions on which results seemed to emerge out of caucus which didn't reflect what we now refer to as the factional balance there, but reflected something in the nature of this dread Sydney/Melbourne axis that States' righters always talk about, and which until 1969 I didn't really believe existed.
EH Now what were the circumstances in which you took over as Minister for the Environment from Jim Cairns?10
BERINSON I think my own appointment to Cabinet was overshadowed very much by the drama of Jim Cairns departure from it. That in turn was just part of a series of traumas that eventually involved him, Clyde Cameron, Rex O'Connor, and so on. It was all terribly destructive from the point of view of the party's standing. No-one went from their position easily or without a lot of tension beforehand. The public perception of that was clearly most unfavourable, and clearly very encouraging to the opposition in any attempt it might make for yet another spill.
EH Now establishing yourself in the portfolio, how did that come about? Was that a simple task?
10Mr Berinson was Minister for the Environment from July-December 1975. TAPE SEVEN SIDE B BERINSON 84
BERINSON I became Minister for Environment without any background in that area at all. It was in any event, a fairly new area. No-one had really thought of a genuine Department for Environment until 1972. I only became the minister in that particular portfolio because that's where Jim Cairns was at the end of his Cabinet career. The Prime Minister was certainly in a position where he would want to minimise any further disruptions by shuffling people around. So there had to be a very quick learning exercise on my part. I was assisted by good staff most of whom I inherited. I think gradually - well not gradually, since the time was so short, quite quickly I got to reasonable grips with it, although from a rather different perspective than a committed greenie would have got. One result of that was that I probably disappointed a number of people who had been encouraged especially by Moss Cass's record, to look for invariably favourable responses to their submissions. I think we did some good things. We carried on with the development of the environmental impact statement system. Some quite big issues came up in that short time, including the first reservation of Kakadu as a national park, I think.
There was a very important, although peripheral issue which I got enmeshed in almost the same day as I became minister and that was the question of nuclear powered or armed warships coming into Australian ports. That's a story on its own, of course, especially when you consider the strong stand on that, that Whitlam took later. Effectively on the same day I was appointed, or on the day of my first Cabinet meeting, he tried to get me to accommodate Bill Morrison in what he referred to as something in the nature of a fairly small but niggling issue that had been worrying Bill Morrison as Minister for Defence.11 He virtually invited me to sign an approval of a proposition that Bill had put forward without bothering to spend any time on it, but on his assurance that it was okay. I told him I'd let him know over the weekend, so that I could at least read the file on the plane home. I opened the file and here's this thing talking about the visits of nuclear powered warships of the American navy to Australian ports, and he'd been inviting me to approve that sight unseen, so that was a bit odd.
EH What was the outcome of that in the end from your point of view?
BERINSON Oh, we started to develop a much modified regime as compared to that put up by Bill, and I'm not even sure that that was finalised by the time we lost office. I don't remember. On the other hand I didn't go along with a number of what I regarded as symbolic and genuinely niggly issues. There was a big deal on at the time about the export of kangaroo skins. That had been based on resistance to the unregulated killing of kangaroos. But by the time I got there that was an area that had become regulated. There were many studies on the need to kill kangaroos, or cull as the kinder terminology had it. In fact there was no alternative to dealing with them in some such way, as they threatened to
11Hon. William Morrison was Minister assisting the Minister for Defence 1974-5, Minister for Defence 1975.
TAPE SEVEN SIDE B BERINSON 85
attain plague proportions in various areas. Certainly there was no question of kangaroos becoming extinct even though there was approval out to shoot some hundreds of thousands of them a year.
Anyway at some stage with an earlier minister a ban had been put on the export of the skins and that made no sense to me any more because we were approving the shooting of kangaroos, but maintaining the ban on kangaroo skins which meant that it was becoming uneconomic to shoot them, even though it was uneconomic not to shoot them. In the end I had to get Whitlam's personal approval to lift the ban on exports.
There are other smaller matters. The Telfer Goldmine looked like being aborted at one stage as a result of the most intensive environmental impact studies; well, intensive by the standards of those days. Someone had come up with the idea that domestic pets could become feral if they were taken on to the mine site. We had to spend three months developing regulations to prevent domestic pets being taken there. I think I gave them about 48 hours and then approved it. That was a bit unpopular at the time, but not with Telfer.
EH As a member of Cabinet did you feel that you were finally able to contribute something to the government, and that perhaps the government was again at a stage where it would be able to achieve some of the things that it set out to?
BERINSON Yes to both. There's nothing to compare with being in Cabinet in terms of actually doing something. But if I could get back to my earlier comment about Bill Hayden. I was very encouraged by Bill Hayden's role in Cabinet, as I was able to observe it. I came into Cabinet just as the budget was getting under way. The circumstances were extremely difficult. He handled it very well. Now also, just before my own appointment, Joe Riordon had got into Cabinet. Then shortly afterwards Paul Keating was appointed. I did have the feeling that, particularly with Bill Hayden's guidance, the government could really turn around. It needed to turn around and I must say my first impressions of Cabinet left me unimpressed generally with its performance, apart from some quite limited exceptions.
EH Can I ask you just to expand on that. Was there a mediocrity about people's contributions, something like that?
BERINSON Well, I was amazed to find that most ministers didn't seem to have applied themselves to other ministers' submissions. In fact at my very first meeting, I remember that by the time I'd spoken for the fourth time on various issues, Gough Whitlam made some comment about my making a nuisance of myself. That was said in a friendly and jovial way at that stage, although later there were digs in the same way. But the truth was that other people were non- contributing, even though some of the submissions, I would have thought, TAPE SEVEN SIDE B BERINSON 86
impinged on their own areas of authority. Now I was commenting on that - nothing to do with the environment, but just as a member of this group that had a job to do in collectively making decisions. I had read everyone's submission. It was a big job. I was just amazed to find the extent to which that was not being done. Hayden was certainly doing it, and Whitlam was doing it, but I don't know who else was doing it. There almost seemed to be an atmosphere around the table of 'you leave my submissions to me and Gough, and I'll leave your submissions to you and Gough'. Very unhealthy.
EH Gough Whitlam's management of Cabinet: was he the autocrat that has been popularly reported?
BERINSON I really don't think I was there long enough to make a judgment about that. I just felt that.... or I gained the impression that a funny system had developed, whereby there were too many bilateral decisions being made between the responsible ministers and Gough rather than collective decisions by the whole Cabinet. Gough was clearly in charge, he knew about all the issues and he obviously had had advice on all the issues, so he was in a very authoritative position to advance his own views, even apart from the authority of his position of Prime Minister. It was not a good decision-making forum. Also much too big, of course.
EH Now the reaction to the 1975 budget, was that a positive reaction?
BERINSON I don't really remember. I think if I recall correctly that most of the commentators immediately gave it a reasonably favourable reception. But it was very, very difficult in those days to do anything popular. It was a matter of doing something responsible. That's the sort of thing that gets you the plaudits of the press and the opposition of your electors.
EH Now the developing events leading up to November 11th, was this a constant theme going through Cabinet discussion, as the pressure came down from the Senate?
BERINSON Again I've got to say I don't recall it, and I don't think it was. Of course, there'd be discussions about what you should do in the Senate or the Reps on any particular day, about any particular manoeuvre.
I remember, for example, writing to Gough to express a view that he should call a half-Senate election; yes, that he should call an election with only half the Senate, without going to the wire, as we were shaping up to do. I don't think I would have written that letter if we'd had a forum to actually discuss it in. I don't think I ever put that view in Cabinet or in caucus, or had the opportunity to. I arrived at that because there's no other reason to write him a letter. So that was another TAPE SEVEN SIDE B BERINSON 87
situation where the crucial decisions were not being discussed while the day-to- day requirements were.
EH I would think there would be such a complex sort of set of reasons for that, but could some of it be the pressure of government, the day-to- day running of things?
BERINSON Oh sure, yes certainly. A combination of that, and the fact that it's easier to deal with particular problems than with general ones, specially the general ones that you can't really solve.
EH Now November 11th itself, can I just ask you to recall the events as you experienced them?
BERINSON I was really taken by surprise in the most literal way.
END OF TAPE SEVEN SIDE B TAPE EIGHT SIDE A BERINSON 88
BERINSON There'd been a caucus meeting in the morning and a little discussion of where we were at and what we might do, but without any resolution of the situation. After lunch the bells rang for Parliament to assemble and I went in and sat in my seat in the front bench next to Joe Riordon. Joe turned to me and said, "I suppose you've heard." I said, "No, what?" He said, "The big fellow's been sacked." It's an indication of how naive I was that I said, "You mean Gough sacked the Governor General?" He said, "No, the Governor General has sacked Gough." It must have taken me 15 or 20 seconds to absorb that because I know that I just sat dumbfounded until I turned to Joe and said, "Joe, if Gough's been sacked that means we've been sacked too." He said, "That's right." Well, that was the end of my ministerial career.
Gough then came in and all these fancy things went on, mutual abuse and moving pointless motions of no confidence in the new government, and messages to the Governor General and so on. But it was all over. I think stunned was the position that most of us were in. By all accounts Whitlam himself must have been stunned. As has often been commented on he didn't take the elementary precaution of letting our senators know so they could have done something on the budget. It was a remarkable day.
EH Ross McMullen in The Light on the Hill expressed the view that the opposition never accepted the legitimacy of the government. What's your opinion of this? Did the conservative parties really see it as their right to rule, and did they have great difficulty dealing with a Labor government and actually just being the opposition?
BERINSON I've often heard that sort of comment. I'm not sure that I know what it means. What I do know is that after 23 years in opposition we found it very difficult to function as a government. That was the source of many of our mistakes and problems.
Conversely after 23 years in government, it seemed to me that the opposition had a lot of trouble working out how to behave in opposition. In fact they often seemed to give indications that they still didn't quite realise that they were in opposition. Now that might be seen by some as justifying this phrase about them having the view of the government being illegitimate.
I think it was.... well, from my limited perspective, I think it was more a matter of them just finding it terribly difficult to get to grips with the role that they hadn't played for so many years.
EH Can I ask you also to comment on the role of the press, perhaps particularly the Murdoch Press, as it changed from '72 to '75?
BERINSON I wasn't close enough to that question to have anything useful to say.
TAPE EIGHT SIDE A BERINSON 89
EH Good. And just perhaps a final question for today's session, Joe, the mythology that has grown up around Gough Whitlam and the Whitlam era, now sort of 20 or more years on. I was aware of this recently, I think as I was saying off tape, when my daughter was listening to a rock group, a new rock group, called The Whitlams, and they played the Whitlam songs over and over on November 11th as a sort of memorial to the day. One of the lines that I managed to hear from the song was, 'He turned the wine to roses'. It's as if really he's become, Gough himself has become, a larger than life figure in the Labor movement, and perhaps in peoples' memories. But so too has that.... Well, perhaps not so too, but that era, that reforming era, has taken on, a proportion in people's memories. Is this a Labor Party phenomena that it has these sorts of heroes? Can I ask you just to comment?
BERINSON I'm probably not a good person to comment on that because I don't know how general this view would now be. One of the many difficulties is that the Labor Party in the 1990s is so different from the party of the late sixties which brought Whitlam into government, that it's hard to imagine today's Labor leaders looking back for much inspiration to him.
He was a larger than life figure, and with all his limitations, and with the limitations that such a short period of government imposed, he did change the direction of the country in a number of respects, which have developed further since.
But in more recent times there has been a recognition which he never achieved, of the importance of economics to politics and government. That really changes the perception that many people have as to what a government has got to do. It's not enough to have good intentions. You've got to build a base that's capable of paying to put those intentions into practice.
I think that period of government did introduce notions that simply weren't there before. The notion - we've talked about environment before - that was not even a notion then. He gave recognition to the early moves by the feminists to improve the position of women. I suppose that would have happened anyway, in keeping with worldwide trends, but he gave it some early recognition and some basis on which to develop further.
He was the first one to look to give some weight to generalised comments about civil rights, and matters of that sort. Life in the cities as an issue, emerged for the first time, and there was a very radical change in the approach to social welfare even as compared with the approach taken by earlier Labor governments, or the Labor governments in the States at that time.
Now a lot of what he did was reversed or changed or modified in some way as Liberal governments came in. A lot was changed after the Hawke Government came with different emphasis into things.
TAPE EIGHT SIDE A BERINSON 90
So I don't know how to summarise all of that. He was effective in his time, but I don't know whether what he did would really stand the test of time if the test is that future generations of the Labor Party should look back to him for guidance. I frankly don't think that they will.
EH Now actually I have one more question before we finish, and that's regarding Kerr's actions, and I suppose Fraser's role in that. Do you have an opinion on that now?
BERINSON I think that it was a gross misuse of his powers to act in the way he did, without making his intentions very clear to the Prime Minister and giving the Prime Minister some opportunity to modify his approach to the crisis, with this background knowledge. I personally never doubted the legality of what he did. I know that kept being raised for discussion. I think it was legal, but improper. I think it was unnecessary at the particular time that he took that dramatic step. I think he's got a pretty poor position in the constitutional history of this country, political history of this country, and can't imagine that any future Governor General would want to use him as a reference point for making decisions on any future problems.
EH And Malcolm Fraser's role in that?
BERINSON Well, he was given a gift and he took it. You could hardly expect a leader of an opposition to refuse to take government when it was handed to him on a platter, and in circumstances where he knew that he could legitimise his actions very quickly by an election which he was certain to win.
A further interview with Joe Berinson recorded on 7 April 1994.
EH Joe, just continuing from our last interview; we finished last time with the defeat of the Whitlam Government in 1975. In 1976 you were back in Perth. You had been defeated. The seat of Perth had been won by the Liberal Party. You resumed your legal studies then. You had already qualified - what further studies did you go on to do?
BERINSON I had completed my degree and in ordinary circumstances I would have looked to taking up articles to enable me to practise. Unfortunately I found that while my back was turned, so to speak, the system of legal qualification in this State had changed so that my degree was no longer regarded as adequate. I was required to do another year at university. It came under some strange category of NFD which stood for "not for degree", but that didn't make it any less painful.
EH Did you go on to do articles as well?
BERINSON Yes. In 1976 I did this additional year at university, and then did articles with the firm then known as Dwyer Durack and Dunphy. TAPE EIGHT SIDE A BERINSON 91
EH Did you practise as a lawyer then?
BERINSON Yes. The articles consumed 1977. I stayed with the firm for the year of restricted practice in 1978, and then I practised 1979 and '80 until I was elected to the Legislative Council in about February or March of 1980. I actually attempted to continue some practice to some modified extent beyond that, and that probably went on for perhaps a year or fifteen months. By that stage I found the combination impractical and I haven't practised since.
EH And your pharmacy practice; had you kept up your pharmacy registration and pharmacy practice at all?
BERINSON Well, I've kept my pharmacy registration to this day, but that's long been for little more than nostalgic purposes, I suppose. I had already stopped practising and sold out of my pharmacies while I was in federal Parliament so that was long behind me by then. Certainly it's always been unthinkable to me that I'd ever return there.
EH Now your continuing relationship with the Labor Party; what did you do in this period between 1976 and 1980? What was your involvement?
BERINSON I maintained my activity with the State executive and the State conference. I think I'm right in saying that I was a delegate to a federal conference at least once, and maybe twice, after the loss of my seat in 1975, and I may even have returned to some position on the State executive offices. I'm not sure of that last point but in any event, even if I was there, it would not have been more than a year or so. So it was limited to that extent.
EH Did you have a desire to return to politics during this time?
BERINSON Yes, I had certainly decided after 1975 that I would want to return. By 1975 I'd only really reached the potential of the position for the first time with my short term in Cabinet, and that certainly gave me the incentive to keep going. Apart from all of that I just retained this very strong political interest that I'd had for some years, and it wasn't the sort of thing to switch off.
EH How difficult was it to gain endorsement for another seat; either a federal or a State seat, and which were you really looking for?
BERINSON My only interest at that stage was in returning to federal politics and I not only found that difficult, but in the end, impossible. That really involved a very demoralising period in my membership of the party and my activity with it. The difficulties I found, I have to confess, were unexpected, very severe and very disappointing.
EH It's probably fairly difficult now to say why, what were the factors that made this the case, but how do you assess it? TAPE EIGHT SIDE A BERINSON 92
BERINSON There was one preliminary difficulty which was understandable, but which I overcame. It arose from the fact that by 1977 the boundaries of the electorate of Perth had been changed in a way which made the seat unwinnable for all practical purposes. On that basis I decided to seek pre- selection for Swan and the difficulty there was.... or the initial difficulty there was that Adrian Bennett, who had previously been the member for Swan and who was defeated in the same election as I was, was seeking preselection there as well. That was unfortunate, but something you have to face up to when redistributions go the wrong way. I, in fact, defeated him when we came to the ballot but then lost out to another and unexpected candidate.
The position at that time caught me by surprise. I suspect that because of my greater remoteness from the State executive during my last period in Canberra, I hadn't realised what was going on at the organisational level; and in fact, what was going on was the beginning of what later emerged as a fully-fledged factional system, which I think I've probably mentioned earlier. There was always a recognisable left faction, but what emerged at this stage was something different. I've never known how to label it. I'm not even sure whether they called themselves the left and I doubt if they did. In any event, whatever they called themselves the name didn't matter much because it was, on my observation, a faction on a totally non-ideological basis. It was a faction that developed on the understanding that if you had enough people combining together through some generalised identity of view, then they could look after each other, and that's what happened. Within a short time, because no-one really organised against them, they secured a great number of preselections and party positions by this very effective mobilisation of numbers. Because I've always retained some rather strong feelings about that process my view may be coloured and you should perhaps ask others. No doubt the participants would themselves suggest that they were motivated by pure ideology and the highest possible motives, and maybe they're right. It's just that I've retained this doubt about that.
EH Who were they? Were they younger people in the party? What were their backgrounds?
BERINSON Well, I don't know who they all were, but there was certainly some forceful leadership from the top. At that stage Bob McMullen had replaced Joe Chamberlain as secretary, and Mal Bryce had become party president. In later years I got on very well with Mal at the State level, and it's only quite recently that I realise I've never really discussed with him what happened in those days and what people were thinking about. I'm sure they were thinking in terms of some revitalisation of the party and the need for better organisation. Certainly there was a need for that given how poor the organisation of the party had been for many years. But beyond that, I don't know how they drew all the strands together, but in the end there were enough strands to exert a very strong influence in almost everything the party did for a number of years.
TAPE EIGHT SIDE A BERINSON 93
EH Was it correct that you sought membership of the federal executive of the party in this period, about 1978/79, and there was a problem with that as well?
BERINSON There was one occasion that when I sought....
[pause]
EH I'll just ask that question again because it comes from a reference in a Daily News article of 17th of 1st 1978, and the question was really: why was it that you didn't receive sufficient support for membership of the federal executive? The article described you as part of the "moderates" and this included John Wheeldon, Brian Burke and Kim Beazley, junior. Can I just ask you to comment on that in the context of the federal executive, and perhaps compare it to an earlier situation when you stood for federal executive?
BERINSON Yes. I don't think you can draw any significance from a defeat for federal executive at that stage, other than it being a reflection of the numbers which the successful candidates could muster. I would think, from memory, that if we're talking about the period when Bob McMullen was secretary and Mal Bryce president, then they would have had the positions and that would have been almost in the ordinary course of events. Historically the secretary and president have very often been the State representatives.
Just as an aside, I've got to say that it's odd to see John Wheeldon listed in that article as one of the moderates, and yet that does say something about it. John Wheeldon had moderated his views in a number of respects over the period that I'd been associated with him in the Federal Parliament. I think from start to finish he would have always been regarded, and regarded himself, as on the left. It's an interesting reflection on that faction's attitude to policies and so on, that he was not in that group. That's no doubt the reason for his being mentioned as a member of another group when the Daily News came to report. The fact is there really wasn't any other group. That didn't develop until a few years later when Western Australia fell into step with the party and the rest of Australia and developed a form of factional structure.
EH I was going to ask you just to compare it with the earlier situation where you stood against Joe Chamberlain for the federal executive.
BERINSON Yes. There was one earlier occasion that I'd stood for federal executive and that did have some potential significance. We've previously discussed the period when I was acting secretary during Joe Chamberlain's absence because of ill health. I think I would have said that one of the efforts that I made at that time was to get more delegates, and more delegates that were more favourably inclined, on to the executive during that period.
TAPE EIGHT SIDE A BERINSON 94
One result of that was that when Joe did come back to the office and the next set of elections for federal executive delegates was called, I estimated that I had a realistic prospect of winning the position against him. That would have been unheard of, and most people wouldn't have realised that there was ever going to be a question of his remaining on the federal executive while he remained active.
END OF TAPE EIGHT SIDE A TAPE EIGHT SIDE B BERINSON 95
BERINSON I did make some quite strenuous efforts at that stage, and I always recall in that context the irony of my approach to the Australian Workers' Union which was then led by Frank Mitchell. He had fallen out with Joe before and the AWU had disaffiliated. That was a big loss to anyone who was on the other side, so to speak, because the AWU had never lined up with what might be called the Chamberlain faction, or the left faction, whatever you will. They were then the largest union in the State and had they retained their affiliation they would have six delegates.
At this stage I went to Frank Mitchell and I urged him as strongly as I could to get the AWU to re-affiliate in time for the election of officers. Well, it's so many years ago and yet I still remember his exact words, which were: "I wouldn't give Joe Chamberlain the satisfaction!" Unfortunately I could not get him to understand that his re-affiliation at that stage would do precisely the opposite of giving Joe any satisfaction, and so the end result was that I lost by three and Frank Mitchell stayed unaffiliated with six; it would have made all the difference. Even coming within three votes of election though, was a huge rebuff from Joe's point of view. He took that very hard as a reflection on him, at least for some short time anyway. It didn't do much to improve the relationship that we had.
By the way, we had quite a businesslike relationship. We had to be closely associated because of my membership of the office, and so we proceeded on a quite civil basis. But that certainly shocked many of the people in the executive, particularly those who'd been so closely associated for many years with Joe as the head, and the natural head, of what went on.
EH Joe, this is going back now to 1979. This is taken from another newspaper article and I'd just like you to comment. It was written by Peter Kennedy in the West Australian, and he said: "Mr Berinson has been passed over because he had adopted a fiercely independent line in the party's State organisation. This has not endeared him to the basically left-wing group ..." it's just getting back to what we were previously talking about, " ... which controlled the 32 member preselection panels, including a core of 24 members elected from the State executive."13 This was, as I said, in 1979; were you then looking for preselection for a federal seat still?
BERINSON No, that had passed. There was the election in '77. I had been defeated in the preselection by Pat Ffoulkes, and that was rather remarkable in itself. Until the preselection was called I didn't know who Pat Ffoulkes was. I mean she was largely an unknown so far as I could see, in the party generally, but she had been active on State executive and must have been a prominent member of this sort of new faction that I've been trying to describe. When I was defeated in that preselection it caused quite a rumpus, and it's the only occasion which I can remember that the State executive in fact took over and overrode the decision of the selection panel to the extent of calling for a new
13West Australian, 22 September 1979. TAPE EIGHT SIDE B BERINSON 96 ballot by the State executive itself. That was sort of dramatic in a quiet way and in the perspective of history didn't account for much, but it was a most unusual procedure. It also didn't change the result because Pat Ffoulkes won there as well.
So I was left looking realistically at no possibility of returning to federal Parliament and, in fact, at that time I thought I'd simply concentrate on the law and forego politics altogether.
EH So in 1979 what brought you back?
BERINSON I had never thought about the Upper House and it was actually suggested to me by Kim Beazley. We're now talking about Kim Beazley junior. To be fair about it, that was not an entirely disinterested suggestion by Kim because he had developed an interest in seeking preselection for the federal seat of Swan himself at that stage. He told me that, but he was also good enough to say that if I decided to seek preselection myself, he would not nominate. So everything was sort of on the table and above board. Having said that he also raised the possibility of a seat in the North Metropolitan Province becoming vacant, and encouraged me to consider that.
The truth of the matter was that at that stage I was considering neither Swan nor any other possibility. I had been quite demoralised by the whole series of events relating to the preselection in 1977, and I had concurrently been enjoying the practice of law and developing a stronger interest in that than I had previously. However, when Kim raised the possibility of the Council seat and also suggested that the preselection was largely there for the taking, I thought about it again and gradually got round to thinking that was a desirable way to go. Of course, it wasn't there for the taking, but that was only to emerge later.
EH Well perhaps we should follow that on first. You actually had to fight for that seat as well?
BERINSON My answer to that has got to be in rather strange terms, in that I simply wasn't interested enough to fight for it all that hard, but other people did. It was really the work of others rather than anything that I did that got me over the line. The preselection, by that stage, had come down to a different system, which had in turn been largely influenced by my own earlier experience with the previous system. Preselection now involved all the State executive plus a group of delegates from the area, an enlarged area, of the metropolitan area in which the seat being contested was located.
Now it's a bit hard to say this without seeming quite immodest, but the field was not strong and yet all the indications were that I was going to have trouble getting the numbers. In the result I lost by a substantial margin among the large group which was comprised of the State executive members, but I got an almost unanimous vote out of the local area delegates. TAPE EIGHT SIDE B BERINSON 97
Stephen Smith who is now, of course, the member for Perth himself, was prominent in the area organisation at the time, keeps giving speeches about how the local delegation voted for me by 25-1. That certainly made the difference because I think I only won by about 12 or 13 in 130 or 140 votes. That certainly made the difference. Stephen Smith also invariably includes in his comments the fact that he knows who the one was but he's not going to say. So when he writes his memoirs perhaps you can ask him.
EH We'll have to asterisk this for a little footnote. How did you actually feel about the Legislative Council at this stage?
BERINSON The universal practice was to deride the Legislative Council and, of course, the Labor Party had long experience which supported its doing so. It had never had a majority in the House. The boundaries have always been gerrymandered against them, and if not the boundaries, then the electoral system which was originally based on the ownership of property. My own view, even before I took any interest, was quite different. My only interest in returning to any sort of politics, especially after the taste of government which I'd had in 1975, was in terms of being IN the government, that is, in the Cabinet. In any respect, it seemed to me that the three seats in Cabinet, which was the standard allocation to the Upper House traditionally, led to a situation where, if anything, it would be easier for a new member to get to the Cabinet from the Upper House than from the Assembly. Once you're in Cabinet it doesn't make the slightest difference whether your seat is in the Assembly or Council.
I had no pretensions of going further than ordinary membership of Cabinet even though that question did arise in my preselection appearance at the executive. So that just seemed to be a quite reasonable way to go. What people thought about the Legislative Council was largely irrelevant to that process.
EH Now does that mean that people were seeing you as a possible future Premier?
BERINSON I think there were some people who feared rather than thought of that as a possibility, and in fact, I think there were only two questions that came up in question time, both apparently designed to embarrass me. I'm talking about the question time which always followed the preselection speeches. The first questions was, would I undertake to discontinue legal practice if I became a member, and I said I wouldn't. Now that was an unpopular answer to give because people expect their members to be full-time members and in general I agree with that proposition. It was probably as much an indication of my not being prepared to make concessions to anyone at that stage, that I just said, no. I really wasn't all that excited about getting to the Legislative Council. I'd sort of passed a peak in 1977 and from that point on my real enthusiasm had been blunted. Putting that together with the fact that I had been developing an increase in experience, the law really put me in quite a good position, you know: "Take it or TAPE EIGHT SIDE B BERINSON 98 leave it. If you want me I'm prepared to do my best; if not, I'm prepared to go and do my best somewhere else." That was a quite comfortable position to work from and I wasn't prepared to make concessions to people who were trying to embarrass me from the floor.
The second question which I think was also meant to embarrass me, but I really couldn't understand why: was I really planning to get to the Legislative Council with a view to taking an early opportunity to shift to the Assembly and become Premier. I left that open as well. I said something silly about Napoleon.... what is it? Napoleon regarding every private as somebody with the marshal's baton in his haversack. [laughs] I don't know what I said but it was something about that. It was pretty silly and pointless but also just along the lines of, you know: "Don't ask me silly questions. No, I'm not even there at all yet we talk about being Premier." Certainly nothing was more distant from my mind at that time.
END OF TAPE EIGHT SIDE B TAPE NINE SIDE A BERINSON 99
A further interview with Joe Berinson recorded on 21 April 1994.
EH The 1980 election was the last [election] of Sir Charles Court and the Court Government. What were your views of this election, Joe, and then we'll go on and talk about the Legislation Council.
BERINSON The government started well ahead in that election as I recall it, and I think there's no doubt that an important element of that was the continued support that Sir Charles Court was able to attract. On the other hand, I must say that Ron Davies who was then Leader of the Opposition, performed well and in fact, better than many people had expected. Later when his position came under challenge I felt that his performance at the 1980 election wasn't being evaluated properly, but that was by then, a separate story. I think it's fair to say that there was no feeling during that campaign that we were going to win, but it got reasonably close and I think the main benefit of that election was to give us a very good launching pad for what came next.
EH To move on now to the Legislative Council. You're quoted as saying, in the West Australian on 25th of the 2nd 1980: "I do not think the Legislative Council will move up in my estimation because I'm there. It was not practical to abolish the Council ... " and there's a gap and it goes on: "... it should be found a more useful role." Can I ask you just to comment on your thoughts on the Council and what it was like once you were actually there and how it changed over the period of time that you were there?
BERINSON The problem with the Council historically really had two branches to it. The first question that always had to be raised when you considered the Council is, why do we still have it? There was a history to the Council which provided an understanding so long as you went back to the Westminster system and the privileged position of the Lords. What had happened was that the Council had been established before the Lords were reformed so that we had the worst features of a house of privilege, so to speak, without the limitations on it which had been implemented in Britain.
The Council started off being an appointed body and that's when there was no Assembly at all. By the time we got the popularly elected House, that being the Assembly, the Council had also come to be elected but on a property franchise. That was gradually liberalised over the years, although I must say, very slowly, until by 1980 there was both universal franchise and compulsory voting.
At that stage a quite different question had to be faced, that is, now that it's not a house of privilege what's it doing there at all? Why do you need it? There was only one possible rational response to that and you could draw on the Queensland experience in that respect. I'm referring to the possibility of arguing that you need a second House to stop an abuse of the Lower House's powers, particularly by way of things like gerrymanders which could entrench the party in the majority in the Assembly from time to time, to just keep going. That's not a TAPE NINE SIDE A BERINSON 100
good answer because you can always find constitutional safeguards and that really left the problem of the Council's purpose intact.
The real answer, and the continuing objection of the Council was that although the explicit privileged position of the Council had certainly changed in terms of the franchise and as a result of compulsory voting, it continued to have an in-built conservative bias, precisely because of the gerrymander that had been implemented in various forms over many years while anti-Labor governments were in a position to do that.
By 1980 the West Australian Parliament in its bicameral form had been in existence for 90 years and a fair proportion of that had involved periods of Labor Government, that is, Labor majorities in the Assembly. There had never been a Labor majority in the Council. As a result we were very antagonistic to the Council, although it's only fair to add that one of the results of that antagonism was that we spent too much time complaining about the hurdles in the way of achieving a majority in the Council and too little time trying to get a majority there. In fact, as later events indicated, that was not an impossible task but it certainly was while we didn't put enough effort into it.
EH Now the change in the Council over the period from 1980 up to 1992.
BERINSON We again went in with a minority in the Council in 1980, although that could hardly be complained about, given the vote in the Council and also the fact that the anti-Labor government had been returned in the Assembly so that there was nothing unfair about that, other than perhaps the numbers. I think a fairer election system might have produced a closer balance of numbers in the Council, but frankly at the moment I don't remember to what extent that would have changed anything.
At the end of the day I think the main difference over that period arose from the change of personnel and particularly the introduction into the Council of a small but very active, not to mention noisy, number of new members. It was only later that it seemed to substantially change the way in which the Council functioned.
EH That's something I've been meaning to ask you about the Labor lawyers that came into the Council. There was Peter Dowding and yourself and Howard Olney. What difference did this make? I suppose perhaps even what difference did it make to Ian Medcalf who'd been the only lawyer there for quite a number of years?
BERINSON I think it did make a difference, and that involved a number of factors. In the first place, the three of us in our own different ways were "performers". Howard Olney was certainly the more quiet and reasoned of the new group, but he could cause a great deal of trouble to the government, especially with someone as responsible as Ian Medcalf on the other side, who TAPE NINE SIDE A BERINSON 101
was inclined to take propositions seriously. It took Ian a terribly long time to carry that concern to the point of actually accepting Opposition amendments, but I think it must have had a sort of corrosive effect on confidence and morale and so on, and that eventually reached the point of some concessions being made. At the end of the day, of course, it's the numbers that count and Ian Medcalf, as Leader of the Government in the Council, understood that quite well, but even if it's only a matter of degree, I think he was more sensitive to it than others might have been. So even though he kept bludgeoning us to death with the numbers, he probably didn't enjoy it as much as some of his predecessors would have.
Peter Dowding was quite different in his approach. He sat directly behind me in the chamber, and since I was closer to him than the government was on the other side of the chamber, it's fair to say that I suffered more than they did on many occasions from the sheer volume which he brought to his argument. That, as I also learned later, was apparently not considered the done thing either. People didn't shout in earlier, more gentlemanly days.
EH So it was still a gentlemen's chamber in the old style?
BERINSON It wasn't by the time we got there. Some of the old-timers were still able to recollect coming into the Council at a time when party divisions weren't recognised, so that members simply had seats depending on when they were elected, rather than on the basis of their party affiliation. That meant that the members of all parties were simply scattered round the place which seemed an odd notion by the time we got there. But still many other things had changed too and we changed them, I think, more in a number of respects.
The Council had started on the basis of a sort of gentlemen's club arrangement which meant that it could start its sittings at half-past four in the afternoon when its members had finished their real work for the day down on the Terrace. They'd complete their business by six o'clock, knock off for tea and then go home. That had changed by the time we got there so that sittings continued after dinner, but it hadn't changed to the extent of meeting earlier than four-thirty which was an extraordinary way to be conducting your working life if you were looking at membership of the Council as a full-time career.
So yes, there were a number of factors like that. I had had some experience in the Federal Parliament and I was aware of the way that the Assembly functioned by the time I got there. It hadn't occurred to me that, for example, in something as basic as questions without notice, the Council would adopt a different attitude, but in fact they did adopt a different attitude in the sense that they didn't expect questions without notice to be asked unless you'd given prior notice. In any event, it was obviously regarded as unusual, to say the least, to carry questions on for more than about ten minutes, and that was very surprising, coming in as a new member, and that changed almost immediately. We took the full half hour which the government would have been prepared to go to as a reasonable limit for questions without notice, and we developed a practice of asking them literally TAPE NINE SIDE A BERINSON 102
without notice, unless there were special circumstances such as unusual detail being sought quickly. It all added up to a certain change in the atmosphere there; although it's difficult to really comment on that too far without experience of the pre-1980 period. For that you need to go to people like Des Dans who'd been there for some years and was then Leader of the Opposition.
EH To move on now to party matters. Brian Burke replaced Ron Davies as the leader. How difficult was this for the party and could you explain some of the background to that leadership situation?
BERINSON The change actually came as something of a surprise to me and it was worked up in fact while I was overseas. When I look back I find that I never seemed to involve myself in factions as the factions developed, which was a deliberate choice. But also I never seemed to be in any of the.... what shall I say? - non-factional intrigues that really have to go on from time to time, especially when leadership questions are raised. I think 1980 had been a bit of a watershed. There were also new members in the Assembly. There were some members who by then had been in the Parliament for a long time with only a three-year period of the Tonkin Government in the early 1970s. So there was a tendency to champ at the bit and to look for some more vigorous and also different activity to try and ensure that we won the 1983 election. I think that although the Labor caucus in 1980 was heartened by the result of the 1980 election, I don't recall any great or even real confidence that the next election was going to be ours, and so people were anxious in that respect.
On top of all of that, of course, you've got to accommodate questions of ambition which are also a very natural aspect of political life. Most of the factors started to work out. Mal Bryce, who had been party president for quite a long time, clearly had aspirations to be leader of the party, but so did Brian Burke and eventually they came to an understanding that they could each pursue that ambition and stymie the other, or that they could get together and allow one of them a real prospect of getting up.
My wife and I were in Europe (I'm pretty sure it was Florence at the time) and I had a call from Des Dans to say that a leadership challenge was on and there was a special meeting of the caucus to be held in seven days time, or whatever the notice required. It was rather a strange conversation because I started on the basis that he was asking me to come back in time for the special meeting, [laughs] but as the conversation proceeded he seemed to be suggesting that I needn't bother. He was treating a Burke win as almost certain. He wouldn't go to the extent of saying that he thought it was a good idea, but he did indicate that since he was certain he may as well go along with it and maximise the benefits of the power of support for a new leader. So far as I was concerned, I might as well either stay in Florence or go to Naples if I liked, but not much point in coming back to Perth.
TAPE NINE SIDE A BERINSON 103
I did come back, a rushed trip back, and I remember I had to ask for the help of the High Commissioner in Singapore at one point to get me on to a connecting flight. The reason I did that was because I decided that I wouldn't support that move, I would support Ron Davies. In the end it didn't matter, of course, it was just as Des had predicted.
EH Can I ask you the reasons for coming to support Ron Davies at that time?
BERINSON I think I've always proceeded on the basis that you should only have one leader at a time, and that unless there was an overwhelming case he should be given the opportunity to show his mettle. I thought that Ron Davies, both in the 1980 election and as Leader of the Opposition in the early stage of the '80/83 Parliament, had performed reasonably well. He was not a great performer but I thought he was doing all right. The main weakness in my own reasoning came from the fact that I didn't appreciate at that time the sort of vigorous and astute leadership which Brian Burke had to offer, and although I saw him as a future leader I thought he was making a premature run and that he wasn't up to winning in 1983. I was wrong in that and I think I realised that very quickly as a result of two developments. One was his early performance as Leader of the Opposition and secondly, the decision, quite soon after his appointment, by Sir Charles Court to resign. I think Sir Charles Court recognised that he would be in much more trouble with Brain Burke as leader than Ron Davies, and I remain pretty confident that whatever was said at the time or since, that would have been a significant factor in his own decision not to contest the 1983 election as Premier but to quit while he was ahead, as the saying goes.
END OF TAPE NINE SIDE A TAPE NINE SIDE B BERINSON 104
EH You were Opposition spokesman on legal matters in the Council, and also on parliamentary and electoral reform. Was this a good grounding for taking over in 1983?
BERINSON Well, it brought me much closer to political issues and also to the sort of activity that we might engage in in government. In the end it didn't relate as much to my future activity as it might have because parliamentary and electoral reform became a major portfolio in the new government, and Mal Bryce took that as Deputy Premier. That left me with the major portfolio of Attorney- General, which I had worked on in a shadow capacity, but during my period in opposition I'd really paid very little, if any, attention at all to either prisons, which became my second portfolio, or to budget management.
EH The 1983 election then, how was this fought and what were the issues, and what was the Labor Party organisation like? Was the Labor Party getting support from business at this stage and did they have a feel about it, that you were going to win?
BERINSON Well, dealing with that in reverse order, I think there was a good level of confidence about the result, although I don't think anyone was taking it for granted. Again Brian Burke's own role was crucial to all of this. It's the received wisdom by now, of course, to talk about Australian elections in terms of being presidential style elections. That's true and he was able to project himself very well. He had done a lot of work between his becoming leader in 1983, in developing ties between the party and all sorts of interest groups. I'll start again. That is really fundamental to the success of any Opposition whether from the point of view of attracting enough new support to itself in a positive sense, or alternatively in a more negative sense, in maximising antagonism to the government.
Brian homed in very well on various interest groups, he did it in an orderly way, and he organised his shadow ministers in relevant areas to be very active as well. Now those groups would include the major opposition community groups like the Chamber of Commerce. He would just keep hammering away at others, but without deluding himself as to the result. He would do that however, I think, to establish a general picture that prevented anyone, for example, from saying that he was anti-business, and from there he would go on to particular sub-groups that were more open to arguments about the benefits of a Labor government. I'm thinking about groups like the tourism industry, certainly the mining industry, the taxi industry. If you move away from industrial groups, he looked to building up support in an organised way with other groups in sports, arts, Aboriginal areas, the environment. All of that was very orderly but also very personalised.
I think there's one other thing that I ought to say which would be relevant in any event, but unfortunately was later coloured by royal commission and WA Inc events. I think that Brian was the first Labor leader to understand the potential of a real professional campaign, and the very heavy cost of mounting the sort of TAPE NINE SIDE B BERINSON 105
campaign that he had in mind. When I think back on my early period in the Labor Party, and the sort of shoestring campaigns that were conducted - the extent to which campaigns were simply left to the financial resources of individual candidates and their campaign committees and so on - compared with the sort of campaign that he was able to launch that put a VERY great emphasis, and exerted very great efforts to attract large new funds for the purpose, it seems to me that there are a number of elections that the Labor Party lost, both State and Federal, that could otherwise have been won. We were real amateurs. I think he gave them the lead federally as well, and he would still be hailed as a hero today for blazing that trail if not for the single disaster of Rothwells and where that led to. But he understood that and it's going to be a big factor in elections from now on.
EH The issues; is it important to talk about those for that election?
BERINSON I don't think you need to talk about them at length, but I think that one aspect of it should be noted and this again is something highly specific to Brian Burke's leadership, although by then, it was also a matter that was recognised federally and perhaps in the party in other States as well; he, however, refined quite markedly the aspect of campaigning I'm going to now refer to.
This involved a recognition in the first place, that there's no point to talking about a need for a swing of two per cent or three per cent or five per cent to win an election. What you have to work out really is the number of seats that you have to win and which electorates have got a decent prospect of providing them. As I say, that had started, but only started to be recognised nationally by the Labor Party, but it was given very great focus in the 1983 election. That resulted in highly specific local policies. One was the Bunbury 2000 policy which was a very attractive policy for people in the Bunbury area, and resulted in our winning both Bunbury and Mitchell. The other was his recognition of the place of the new northern suburbs, the Whitford area and surrounding, and again the highly specific policies directed to their needs in relation to the circumstances in a rapidly developing new area. So there was the genesis of policies like the northern railway, the amenities of those areas, the commitments to a much more rapid development of the freeway going north; real doorstep issues but highly focussed on target electorates, and that's what won it.
EH The Burke Government was perceived as being, and was, a young government in terms of the age of quite a few of the politicians that came in as ministers. I was wondering were you, or perhaps Keith Wilson as well, seen as being sort of older, wiser heads of the party at all at that time, the more experienced members, and did a lot rest on your shoulders for that reason?
BERINSON I don't think it just came down to a question of how old you were, but of the extent to which you tried to persuade people about different issues and perhaps, in particular, the way in which you tried to develop a view on TAPE NINE SIDE B BERINSON 106
areas outside your own [portfolios]. In my own case, I think I always tried to approach government activity in a very broad way so that, although my first emphasis obviously would be on what needed to be done in my own portfolios, I'd try to put myself in a position to at least comment or contribute in some way to policies that were going on in other areas. To the extent to which my views or Keith's carried any particular weight that didn't relate to our age, I think, but to what we were saying. Certainly at all stages and with all the leaders over that '83 to '93 period, there was no-one's views which would carry the weight of the Premier, and that was irrespective of his or her age.
EH Yes, I shouldn't have said just age but experience as well that goes with age.
BERINSON I think one other comment might be relevant and that is that the influence.... this is really related to my parting comment before about Premiers, I think that to a great extent the ability of any minister to have some influence on events depends on the extent to which the Premier of the time puts some weight on to that minister's views.
EH Getting down now to Cabinet and the functioning of Cabinet, we've talked about Brian Burke's style as the leader; how did the Cabinet come together and work under his direction?
BERINSON There was a bit of trial and error to start with because very few of the Cabinet had any prior experience in government. I'd had a short period in the Federal Cabinet, but I think I'm right in recalling that only two of the 1983 cabinet had been in the previous State Government, and they were Dave Evans and Ron Davies. I think that's right, isn't it?
So there was a need to get to grips with it but I would think on the whole, we adopted the pattern of the previous Cabinet on the basis of advice from the public service, and then modified it as we went along. One thing we never did really learn in any detail was how previous governments had performed. When I think back it's rather surprising that we didn't just spend a few minutes hearing from Dave Evans and Ron Davies as to what they thought might usefully be adapted from their earlier experience in the Tonkin Government. I don't recall either hearing anything comprehensive said by the public servants as to the way in which the O'Connor Government, or its predecessors, had functioned. You wouldn't expect the public servants to go into detail beyond the procedures but I don't really recall that being addressed. It really just happened.
EH That's an interesting period, that handover period, especially after the Court Government which had been in power for a long period of time. The question of the public service and the handover and people becoming familiar with their portfolios, is that important to comment on that?
TAPE NINE SIDE B BERINSON 107
BERINSON I don't know that I can comment usefully. In my own situation I was quite content to carry on with both the public service structure and the public service personalities who were in charge of the Crown Law Department and of what was then called the Chief Secretary's Department. My initial appointment was as Chief Secretary because that included prisons as a major element, but it had a bit of an odds and sods function with other agencies as well. Not only that, but I was quite content to carry on with Ian Medcalf's office staff. I asked them all if they were comfortable continuing and they were, and I was certainly comfortable with them. They were a very good professional group and I must say that when I retired, I suggested to Cheryl Edwardes as my successor, that she also would be doing very well to retain the services of the group that I had left. There was only one exception to that, but as far as I know that involved a new appointment rather than a replacement one, and that was the position of principal private secretary which we introduced as a government in all ministries, to provide for explicitly political advice. As I say I'm not sure whether the previous government had had that, but I'm inclined to doubt it. Certainly the Richard Court Government has continued our policy in that respect and they have a team of government political advisers in place, although I don't know what they're called now. But that was the only difference in my case.
If I can speak more broadly I'd again have to say, without knowledge of the detail, that Brian Burke had obviously had significant contact with both John Cain in Victoria and John Bannon in South Australia, and I think that he came in with an established view that it was important after a very long period of anti-Labor government to have some changes in the top personnel in the public service who would otherwise probably be unable to adapt themselves adequately to the changed circumstances and the new policies.
END OF TAPE NINE SIDE B TAPE TEN SIDE A BERINSON 108
A further interview with Mr Joe Berinson recorded on 26 May 1994.
EH Starting off today's session, could we look at your role first as Attorney-General: what you hoped to achieve; areas of interest that you had; the agenda you set first of all.
BERINSON I think that our election policy in relation to Attorney-General matters really set out the guidelines for what I was likely to do. The main issues there were some positive moves in terms of implementation of Law Reform Commission reports, updating of the criminal law and a general move on increased efficiency in the legal system and more ready access to legal aid. With the exception of the references to implementing reports, the policies we enunciated were in very general terms so that there was no real restriction on the extent to which we could move.
What I quite quickly found as I looked at my other role as first of all Chief Secretary, but then under the new name of Minister for Prisons, was that there was an interaction obviously enough between criminal law and the prison system on the one hand, and the use of prison on the other. So they quite quickly became intermeshed in terms of policy formulation.
EH The previous Attorney-General, Ian Medcalf, had declined, or hadn't utterly declined but hadn't taken on the Prisons portfolio. Was that a choice on your part?
BERINSON No, it wasn't. That was the decision of the Premier. I think it makes sense to have those two associated and I've noticed that they have become even more closely associated from a ministerial point of view with the new government, given their creation of the so-called Justice Ministry. As it happens I don't agree with what's happened to that Justice Ministry. I think that the government has been led astray by some of its earlier undertakings, but to the extent that the Attorney-General is associated with the prison system, I think that's a very reasonable combination.
EH Did it become, in the long term, quite burdensome in a way, to be having to deal with prisons, prison ideology, as well as the law side of it?
BERINSON The prisons part of my portfolios did take up a fair amount of time and certainly involved a lot of consideration. Part of that was due to the fact that I'd never considered anything about prisons before; as I might have said earlier, that was an entirely new area to me.
As well as that though, there was the consideration that the prisons, simply in a physical sense, were at a point of needing considerable attention and, probably more importantly, there was a need to consider the philosophy, if you like, of imprisonment as a sanction, and the management philosophy within the prison system itself. TAPE TEN SIDE A BERINSON 109
Putting all of those together led to a situation where prisons did take a lot of consideration. I must say I was helped very much there by the executive directors of the departments, particularly Ian Hill, who was the executive director for most of my time as the Prisons minister.
EH It would probably be good later on to follow up some of those questions, particularly the ones to do with prison reform, but if we could go on perhaps with your role as Attorney-General. Can I ask you about the criminal code, amendments to the criminal code and the Murray Report? Was the Murray Report something that was brought to your attention early on?
BERINSON If I remember correctly, the Murray Report had been presented to the previous Attorney-General, Ian Medcalf, but had not been publicly released by the time of the election. In any event, it came to my notice very early on and it was also publicly released very early.
The Murray Report was an interesting document in that it was very largely the work of one man and it didn't follow a committee process or a process of public inquiry. It ended up as a sort of annotated commentary on the criminal code and I often thought that if it was available down at the university it would be very helpful for the criminal law students at the time. It wouldn't be so helpful now because so much of the code has changed.
EH So it wasn't just a rewriting of the criminal code as such?
BERINSON The report itself didn't rewrite the code; it commented on every single section of that very large Act. In some cases the comment was simply left on the basis that he didn't think there was anything requiring attention. In other areas there was actually a recommendation for amendment, and there was also a third category where Michael Murray essentially set out the alternatives, including various moves made in other jurisdictions, and essentially left it to government to decide.
When the report came to attention there was an expectation, I suspect, that if we were going to move on it then we would go to a complete rewrite of the criminal code. I did in fact consider that, then I rejected it on the basis that would be such a huge undertaking that I didn't believe it could be done in any reasonable period of time. As well as considerations of delay though, there was the fact that I was anxious to get other views before initiating various amendments, and to put out an enormous document like that for public comment didn't open the way for what I considered to be the necessary degree of further input. As a result I took a decision to act on the Murray Report in parts and we proceeded to divide up the various parts of the code so as to establish fairly well-defined policy areas and then work on them one at a time. I've frankly forgotten the number now but in the end I think we introduced something of the order of 80 separate Bills on the Murray report alone, and even then, much to my sorrow, we didn't finish the job. We came very close to finishing and I hope the present government will do that. TAPE TEN SIDE A BERINSON 110
EH Yes. So this covered the whole period that you were in government?
BERINSON We started work in '83 and I think almost the last Bill that I introduced from my portfolio also involved amendments to the code based on that Murray Report. So there was a lot of attention to that, a lot of work, and I think on the whole, with very good results. I think I should make the point though, that our work on the criminal code, and more generally on the criminal law, was not restricted to the Murray Report; other issues arose and were dealt with as required.
EH I just really wanted to ask you if there were specific things in other reports to do with the Law Reform Commission that we should cover in this context?
BERINSON I don't think we need to go into specific items coming from the Law Reform Commission, but suffice to say that the Commission had been there amassing a collection of recommendations which hadn't gone anywhere. I suspect that Ian Medcalf himself was frustrated by that but I made it an early project to ensure that we'd take these reports out of the pigeonholes and do something about them. That again involved public consultation and input on the recommendations of those reports and I think I'm right in saying that over that ten year period we established a record of implementation which was not matched anywhere in Australia, either by the Commonwealth or by any other State, all of whom had equivalents to our Law Reform Commission but all of whom had continually stockpiled their reports rather than acting on them.
There was one other report that I'd mention that had also been commissioned before our time (it came to be called the Clarkson Report), and that was the report of the committee on the organisation and operation of the legal profession. Again, we worked through that in a very orderly way and although that took some time, we implemented most of the recommendations. It was again one of my last items of legislation and that was to replace the previous Barristers' Board arrangement with what is now the Legal Practice Board, and that introduced a new measure of accountability and particularly participation in questions going to the discipline, and the proper function of the legal profession.
EH Perhaps this is the opportunity then to ask you about your relationship with the Law Society. Over the period there would have been different presidents of the Law Society during that period, and just the general sort of dealing with complaints against lawyers. Was this brought to your attention during that period?
BERINSON I would only have complaints brought to me about lawyers in a political sense, if I can put it that way. I had no direct role in the disciplinary provisions although theoretically the Attorney-General in those days, was ex officio the Chairman of the Barristers' Board. In practice, and I understand for TAPE TEN SIDE A BERINSON 111
many years before my own term, those duties had been delegated to the Solicitor-General. That's what I did and that effectively removed me from a capacity to act on individual complaints. My role in that respect was really restricted to forwarding complaints to the Barristers' Board, and sometimes to the Law Society, and the only exception to that would be where complaints seemed to throw up a general problem which might require legislative attention. I would then deal with that in a parallel way.
EH And relationships with the Law Society?
BERINSON Well, I think my relationships with the society were good but it's a question of asking the society whether that was that was their opinion as well. Because of the restricted period of my own practice before going into Parliament I didn't have a close personal association with the practitioners, but I don't think that really mattered. I early on made it clear that I was happy to meet with the society whenever they thought that would be helpful and we set up a informal system where we regularly met three or four times a year. Needless to say, I couldn't always satisfy the sort of concerns that they were bringing to me, but I think I did on a reasonable proportion of the issues, and my own judgment would be that the society had little to complain about.
Apart from that sort of regular and fairly organised contact, I also made it a practice to forward every proposed piece of legislation from my own portfolios to them, and also legislation by other ministers which I thought involved issues of interest to the society. I did the same thing with many other organisations, of course, the Bar Association, the various legal groups around the city - the Family Law Association, the Criminal Lawyers and so on. But I always appreciated the extent to which the Law Society were trying to respond and on the whole I found their comments very helpful.
EH Oh it just comes to mind actually, Labor Lawyers; it seemed to become more of a lobby group in this period. Was the Labor Lawyers Association formed during this period or had that been a longstanding group?
BERINSON Oh no. It had been a longstanding group, but with due respect to them, I don't think they became either a significant lobby group or one that even came to public attention all that often. I would have to say that their influence on the course of events was very limited.
EH Now the Crown Law Department.... I suppose it's just a general question first. You'd walked into Ian Medcalf's department really, and you said in the last interview that you invited the Ian Medcalf's staff to stay on.
BERINSON No, I was talking abut his ministerial staff.
EH Oh, his ministerial staff.
TAPE TEN SIDE A BERINSON 112
BERINSON In that respect, in terms of the departments, of course, you don't have a choice.
EH No. Did you expand the department and make changes in that department once you took over as Attorney-General?
BERINSON No, I think the structure of the department effectively remained very much the same as I had inherited until the very last period of our government when the DPP office was created as a separate institution. There were some changes that were made but they were fairly peripheral. For example, I found that if I was to have any prospect of satisfactorily dealing with issues like the implementation of the Law Reform Commission reports and the Murray Report, and in particular, if I wanted to initiate other measures generally covered by my portfolios, it was necessary for me to have some sort of legal advice unit of my own. Their role would be somewhat different from the general one of Crown Law legal advice which would normally be on the basis of, this is what the law is in relation to the particular problem that the government has to deal with, or alternatively we'd come across a problem in the administration of one or other of the present Acts and we'd think such-and-such amendment ought to be initiated.
If you move from there to a more general question, asking for advice for example, on the implications of a change of the Parole Act, you're getting into much broader fields and you need people who are prepared to step over the bounds of strict legal advice to what we might call policy advice. In other areas, you'd put in politically related people but I think in the areas I was dealing with I still needed the legal professionals rather than politically motivated people. So we had that unit. It was only a small unit. I don't think it ever reached more than four or five but without it I don't believe we could have moved nearly as well in all the areas that we did.
EH And was it staffed by lawyer? Were these four lawyers that you had?
BERINSON Well, there may have been researchers who were lawyers or administrative backup but they were based on the legal professions, yes.
EH In 1984 we saw the abolishment of capital punishment in Western Australia. Was this one of your priorities?
BERINSON Yes, it was. I can't remember whether we put it in the election platform in 1983, but it had been in Labor's general platform since time immemorial. I personally had a very strong attachment to that policy and the Premier, Brian Burke, also did, and I must say it was very satisfying, after very many unsuccessful attempts in the past, to actually get that through the Parliament. In the previous periods of Labor Government, measures to abolish capital punishment had quite regularly passed the Legislative Assembly but they'd always been defeated in the Council. We had a happy combination of TAPE TEN SIDE A BERINSON 113
events at that time, even though we didn't have a majority in the Council, and I must say it really was a very satisfying experience to be able to see the abolition through.
EH Yes. Well, you obviously had support from the Labor Party, but was it seen as controversial at the time?
BERINSON Yes, it was. I doubt whether there's ever been a time when public opinion polls in Western Australia would have shown majority support for the abolition of capital punishment. We were not an exception to the rule in that sense in that I believe that would be the position throughout Australia and yet, one by one, all the jurisdictions have abolished it. By the time we came to it, we were the last hanging State in the country, and when I say hanging State, that was in theory only. I think there had been something like nineteen years since Cooke's execution and during the period of the previous Liberal Government, even though they still staunchly stood by the death penalty, they had commuted sentences in cases where the murders were really.... I was going to say the very worst type, but nearly the very worst type. As it happened previous murders were put in the shade by the terrible series of murders by the Birnies that occurred under our jurisdiction after capital punishment had been abolished.
EH Yes, 1984 also saw the Equal Opportunity Act. Was this another priority?
BERINSON It was a government priority but I must say not one of mine and, in fact, it came to my portfolio more or less by accident. Our election platform had emphasised it quite strongly. The Premier was committed to it and, if I remember correctly, actually took responsibility for it in the first place but then decided to deal with it as something in the nature of a general law reform issue and I was given the carriage of it.
EH The Mickelberg brothers.... in 1983 I think, it was recorded that at least part of the saga that seemed to be on-going. Was dealing with the Mickelbergs one of the problems that sort of followed you through those years?
BERINSON Again I'm not sure of the time. I think they were actually convicted when we were in government, and there was no doubt that that led to constant running battles as they went one appeal procedure after the other, all of which were unsuccessful. There was a strange confusion of issues in my own mind about the Mickelbergs, if I can put it that way: on the one hand there was nothing before me to raise any real doubt about their conviction as such; on the other hand I always thought that the penalty that had been imposed in their cases was extraordinary.
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BERINSON As my term in office proceeded it became more and more extraordinary as we moved to quite strenuous efforts to find alternative penalties to imprisonment, and particularly to alternative remedies where violence wasn't involved. It ought to be remembered, by the way, that the Mickelberg case was not a simple case of fraud on the Mint or embezzlement or theft, but involved at least one, I think perhaps even two, cases of arson which is an offence that does have potentially serious consequences. Even so, the penalties seemed to be too much.
Somewhere along the line I arranged for a message to be conveyed to the Mickelbergs that what I thought they ought to do was to apply for some remission of sentence. But that was impossible to proceed with while they continued to maintain their innocence, and particularly when they raised the quite unique prospect of a fingerprint having been forged. That gave a whole new lease of life to the appeal process and in fact we spent a lot of State money ensuring that their claims about falsification of the fingerprint were subjected to the best available international expertise, including those that they had nominated.
As part of that process I also acted on one of the special powers of the Attorney- General under the criminal code to request the Criminal Appeal Court to again consider the issue of the Mickelbergs, even though all of their ordinary appeal rights had been exhausted. That was done, they were again not successful and it was only after that that an application was made for a remission of sentence. I took the initiative to recommend a remission to Cabinet, which I might say was receptive to what I'd said and agreed to the remission that I proposed. I think I should also make the point that the remission which I proposed was well in excess of what my ministerial legal advisers had supported, but needless to say, once the remission had been finalised, I didn't get any thanks for that. What happened was that I was subject to another line of attack from the Mickelbergs to the effect that the remission wasn't enough. That's just in the ordinary course of events.
EH [....] What was involved in not getting the Financial Interest Bill through in 1983?
BERINSON That Bill was designed to call for a declaration of interests, the financial interests of members of Parliament, and we simply split on party lines. The Bill was carried in the Legislative Assembly because the government supported it. We didn't have a majority in the Legislative Council and every member of the Opposition voted against it. In later years, of course, as we came to the royal commission, questions arose as to whether a Bill of that sort may or may not have helped to overcome either the actual problems or else the suspicion of problems that emerged during the royal commission. Whatever one's view of that is, the fact remains that when the government again introduced a Bill of that sort following the royal commission, the opposition accepted it, but only after watering it down further. TAPE TEN SIDE B BERINSON 115
EH How much pressure was there on the Opposition in the Legislative Council to pass Labor legislation, especially early on in the government, and what was a popular government?
BERINSON I've often thought back on those days. It might be why they passed as much as they did. They did reject an awful lot of what we were proposing, but I've never really worked out why they passed as much as they did. I was in the firing line on most of the really contentious Bills because I represented both the Premier and Deputy Premier, and it's hard even for me to recall the sort of pressures that went on in the Council. We just talked for hours and hours on end without very often getting anywhere. But I think the Opposition responded in part to claims of the so-called election mandate but only in a small part. When it came to questions of electoral reform, for example, they weren't too worried about mandates, they were worried about making sure that whatever happened didn't affect their future electoral prospects.
Another factor which I find hard to explain and also hard to quantify might come under the general heading of shell shock. They didn't quite believe that they were in opposition and in fact, they often carried on in the Council as though they weren't still in Opposition. It was a very strange atmosphere at times, particularly when Des Dans was the Leader of the Government in our House; he would often make a point of just reminding them that we were actually the government. A combination of all those factors though, did result in a significant number of contentious issues passing through the Council.
There was one other factor that was quite important and that was that in their early period in opposition, in fact it went on for some time, the Liberals and the National Party weren't the best of friends. They'd been in a coalition government but they were not in coalition in opposition and in fact, they would go off on tangents from time to time when the Nationals as such wouldn't support the Liberals as such. Not only that but we had the advantage that both parties were continuing to assert that their members had a degree of independence individually, which the Labor Party would certainly never accept. The result of that was that from time to time, even though we couldn't get the Opposition as such to support some of our measures, enough of their individual members would do so to get us past the line. Capital punishment was like that, for example.
EH Did this involve a great deal of lobbying and counting of numbers, especially on the part of the Whip, to work out what could go through and what wasn't?
BERINSON Oh, you just had to have all the members who were permitted to have in the House available. He wouldn't do it, any lobbying. Ministers would lobby even their counterparts on the other side, or individual members who had indicated they might be amenable to supporting us or would consider supporting us with certain amendments and so on. So there was a fair bit of that constantly under way. TAPE TEN SIDE B BERINSON 116
EH Getting back to responsibilities as Attorney-General and questions of deciding parole and changes to the Parole Act, there was a report in 1985 in the West Australian where you seem to be accused of going easy on crime? Was this a sort of, I suppose, a typical sort of criticism that would come through? I think this was probably to do with the Archie Butterley (I don't know if we should actually be naming people) case where the Prisons' Department was actually holding an inquiry into the system of release of prisoners?
BERINSON I can't trust my memory too much on individual cases. I thought, well my memory was, that the problem with Butterley was not so much that he'd been released on parole but he'd been allowed out of prison in order to attend university lectures. I would have to check that to be sure.
Getting back to your main question about accusations of going soft on crime, that's simply run-of-the-mill. Of course I was accused of going soft on crime, and you're going to find that the present government, who have come into office with a very strong law and order policy, will become accused of being soft on crime before too long either. The problem is that no government is going to be given credit for an adequate law enforcement system unless crime stops. Unfortunately crime is not going to stop, and not only that, it's most unlikely that it will decrease. That's the basic problem, you have to live with it.
I thought you were going to say, by the way, that I was criticised for taking so long with the review of the Parole Act because that was one of the undertakings that we had given at the election without really having any clear idea of what we wanted to do about it. In the end, I must say that it did take some time but that resulted from that fact that my consideration of parole quickly got bound up with my consideration of the more general question of the rate of imprisonment, and I thought it was essential that we should make our approach to parole consistent with whatever we did on the larger subject.
EH Were you happy with the changes to the Parole Act when you brought it in? Did it somehow balance out those considerations?
BERINSON I have to say that I was happy with the new Parole Act because it was quite an unusual development in the sense that I practically decided it completely myself. In fact the last calculations as to how you could make sense of the sort of parole provisions that involved mathematical calculations, I did on the plane coming out of London. You had to make sure that there was a sensible interaction between the parole eligibility, which in most cases we brought down to a third of the main sentence, and other provisions related to release from prison where an automatic one-third remission applied where parole was not available. It was also necessary to look at questions as to the point at which parole could become available at all, given the general view that it was undesirable to have parole periods which were either too long or too short. That involves too many complications so I won't go into it, but suffice to say TAPE TEN SIDE B BERINSON 117
that I thought that our new Parole Act was much better than the old one, and although the new government says that all parole considerations are again up for review, I would be fairly optimistic that the basic structure will remain largely intact.
EH Joe, what was your general view in designing that Act? Was it to somehow reduce the amount of imprisonment?
BERINSON That was only a very small (and I think even incidental) part of the problem. There was a very basic problem with the old Parole Act, in my view, and that was its requirement on the judges to establish both a maximum and minimum sentence. That led to many inconsistencies and a lot of people had difficulty making sense of the results which often followed. I say that in spite of the fact that many of the jurisdictions of Australia still have that situation.
There was also a very unfortunate result from that sort of system, which was that every release on parole had to be considered by the Parole Board. In other words, a minimum sentence didn't mean that the person would be released at that point; they were considered for release. There was a VERY high proportion of releases on the minimum date - from memory in excess of 90 per cent, perhaps even 95 per cent. But the possibility that they would not be released created very great stresses in the prison population and, as I often had to keep saying as minister: "It's not just a matter of soft on crims or kinds of prisoners to try and relieve those sort of stresses, there's a much more basic question involved in that, is the state of mind with which prisoners come back into the community. Every effort has to be made to see that when they do come back, they come back with an attitude which will discourage further offending rather than encourage even higher rates of recidivism."
All of those issues had to be attended to in trying to create a new system, and one of the important results of the new Act that we implemented was that in the very great majority of cases parole, where it is available, operates automatically at the date of sentence. There are many protections against that, but there's an ability by the court to say that parole should not apply at all. There is a provision requiring the prison authorities to bring to attention anything in the conduct of the prisoner that might indicate that he should not be released. There is a provision that automatic release on parole should not apply in any event where the head sentence is six years or more, but then you're dealing with the more serious offenders and almost exclusively serious offences involving either violence or drugs, so quite separate issues arise.
EH Were you in a situation of having to be a final arbiter in certain cases or situations? Would those cases come to you?
BERINSON There were a very limited number of cases, especially after we brought in the new Act, and they related to life sentences; for practical purposes they related to life sentences. Depending on what category of life TAPE TEN SIDE B BERINSON 118
sentence had been imposed a prisoner could be eligible for parole after five years or ten years or twenty years, but they couldn't be released without the order of Governor in Council. That effectively meant a Cabinet decision. My understanding is that in previous governments all such decisions had in fact been brought to Cabinet. At quite an early stage I asked for and received the agreement of Cabinet to proceed with these decisions at my own discretion unless I felt it necessary myself to raise associated issues with the Cabinet. Of course, Orders in Council required that the recommendation of the Attorney-General be countersigned by the Premier, but I think it's fair to say that in all these cases the various Premiers that I served under accepted my recommendation, even without discussion [unclear].
EH Really this question is one concerning judicial appointments and the consultations that took place and the recommendations that you made. We don't need to go through all the appointments that were made but perhaps key ones and the consideration that you gave to major judicial appointments.
BERINSON I think the process that I followed was largely the same as that adopted by previous governments. In my own case, I would also turn first to the Solicitor-General, Kevin Parker, for a list of possibilities, and I would always, both in that and other respects, put very heavy weight on his views. But then, as a matter of course, I would always then go to the chief justice and the chief judge of the District Court; where an appointment of magistry involved I would go to the chief magistrate and I would also seek the views of the professional bodies such as the Law Society and the Barristers' Board in particular. As well as that I would have discussions with anyone else at all who I thought might have a helpful view to offer, but in the end the recommendation would be mine. I should have mentioned before, by the way, the Chairman of the Family Court of Western Australia in cases where an appointment to that State court was involved.
The recommendation was mine. It would very often be drawn from a short list that had emerged from these various discussions, and in some cases it would inevitably be influenced by what might be regarded as political consideration. By that, I certainly do not mean the appointment of people with a particular view to Labor policies because unlike the High Court there's no practical point to have anyone.... what I am thinking about is the party's attitude to equal opportunity; particularly the advancement of women into some sort of position on these bodies which reflected their position in the profession generally. That was not as easy to do as it might seem, if only because there was, when I came to office, a very marked difference between the proportion of women going through law school and graduating and the proportion of women among the practitioners who could be considered for judicial office. Women were fairly latecomers and so their large numbers were heavily concentrated in the younger and less experienced groups. All of that will change; it started to change in the ten years that I was there, but within another ten years you're going to find that 50 per cent of women students at law school in university, are going to be reflected in something that is close to TAPE TEN SIDE B BERINSON 119
50 per cent (allowing for drop-outs) among the senior practitioners and so that problem will become easier.
That, I think, was the major additional factor and it led, for example, to the first appointment.... of a woman judge in the District Court and the first magistrate....
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A further interview with Joe Berinson recorded on 9 June 1994.
EH We'll continue on from last week where we were discussing the appointment of judges. In particular, you were discussing the appointment of a female magistrate and District Court judge. Who were those appointments?
BERINSON The District Court judge, I think, was the major breakthrough, and that was Judge Toni Kennedy. I don't want to leave any impression, by the way, having spoken about the need to appoint judges on merit, that Judge Kennedy was appointed other than on merit. At the same time, her appointment did reflect our interest in moving positively on equal opportunities for women, and I think the best way of explaining that would be to say that having reached the short list on the appointment concerned, Judge Kennedy did have the advantage from that point on, and in fact her availability and her place in the short list were welcomed by us and grabbed. So there was a small element of advantage in being a woman there, and there was a small element, I suppose, of positive discrimination, but the appointment would not have been made if we weren't very satisfied that it would be a suitable appointment from the court point of view as well as from the point of view of any other consideration.
EH What were the other appointments that you needed to make? You increased the number of District Court judges.
BERINSON There was a very big increase over our decade in office in both Supreme Court and District Court appointments. The growth of the court business was enormous. In relative terms, the number of magistrates increased only to a minor extent but we did reach a point where it was really quite hard to find suitable appointees.
EH And the backlog in civil cases, even in these first three years you'd been able to make substantial inroads into that backlog. How had you been able to do this?
BERINSON Well, there was a combination of circumstances. One involved the appointment of additional judges, and from time to time in the Supreme Court we appointed commissioners or acting judges. The other was a gradual move to an increase in efficiency in the court operations. The District Court, in particular, cut through a huge amount of its personal injury business by the introduction of compulsory conferences in advance of hearings with a view to encouraging settlement. I forget the exact figure but they ended up as being settled somewhere around 80 or 90 per cent of potential cases, so that was a big saving.
Just as we left office in 1993, there was also a proposal which we had approved and was being implemented in the Supreme Court, to have a crash course, so to speak, in clearing the civil case backlog, and I think that ended up being implemented in about August of 1993. That again had a HUGE impact. It cut out a lot of delay techniques that the profession was otherwise capable of using. It forced hearings to proceed or to be settled, and I think within that one month, or TAPE ELEVEN SIDE B BERINSON 121
six weeks, the back of the problem had effectively been broken. It's a lesson in what might be done.
EH Joe, can I just ask you to expand on that a bit? How did you fix this?
BERINSON Well, the plan itself, I should stress, was initiated within the court and mainly, I think, on the initiative of Chief Justice Malcolm. It involved setting aside all other business of the court for that month. The criminal appeal hearings, for example, which take three judges at a time to hear, and other matters, were put aside for the nominated period and every available judge was put on to civil work.
There was a preliminary process where all parties were called in and there was the equivalent, or something like the equivalent of the pre-hearing conference where the judges and masters put considerable pressure on the parties to settle there and then, or at least before hearing date if they were indeed going to settle. There was a strict schedule of hearing dates set up with virtually no capacity for the parties thereafter to seek adjournments or delay in any way. Now that had a very salutary effect and in a position where virtually no excuses were acceptable - neither the unavailability of counsel or witnesses or anything else - the results were achieved.
Now that, I'm sure, was done at some cost to the pressures on counsel, and also parties for that matter, but it worked. Nonetheless I think that the problem of backlogs is still with us and from start to finish, on my memory of the detail, the backlog in the criminal jurisdiction in the District Court really just kept on increasing. I think even now there's something in excess of six or eight months delay in defended cases in the District Court, and that's a long time in criminal cases.
EH Wigs and gowns were another issue which you took up. Could I ask you to comment?
BERINSON I did take it up and that was not on the basis that I thought that the abolition of wigs and gowns would solve any major problems in the legal process, but just that they had reached the point of being absurdly anachronistic. I think there are some additional practical arguments against that because I think there's a positively undesirable effect of the formal dress in court, in terms of the effect on parties and witnesses. That sort of traditional style can be overbearing. It can also lead parties to believe that they're being represented better than they really are, and as a result, blunting their ability or willingness to be critical of their counsel. So all in all it was a situation where I found nothing to support the retention of wigs and gowns, and everything to oppose them. Nonetheless, it wasn't a matter of life and death and it was very clear that the judges who could have changed the position under their own authority, would not change it, and any attempt to effect the change by legislation would be doomed by the opposition in the Upper House.
TAPE ELEVEN SIDE B BERINSON 122
My only small, one might say infinitesimal victory in that area occurred in the Family Court. The Family Court had originally been set up under an Act which precluded the wearing of wigs and gowns. That changed in about 1989 or so, when the Family Court of Australia went into formal dress. The Family Court of Western Australia is the only court outside of that system, even though it operated under the same Act in many respects. The question of wigs and gowns, however, required separate action on our part, and I declined to take that action in the face of considerable urging from the profession, from the courts and even from Peter Dowding who was the Premier at the time. I was assured that I was putting the lives of our judges at terrible risk and that the standard of our courts would suffer in comparison with the others and that there would be all manner of other dreadful consequences; and, of course, there were none.
Our court, as it happens, continues to be held up as a model for the Family Court of Australia in other States to emulate. There was no detriment of any kind that anyone could observe, and that remains as a small example of the mistaken view in respect of the usefulness of wigs and gowns generally.
EH I'd just like to follow through a little further the general issue that you've raised through this question, of the distancing of the law and of people from the law in lots of ways. Have there been other measures that you've been able to use to somehow reduce this distancing of people?
BERINSON I don't think so, not in terms of the court process itself. The point is that for the great majority of people, an appearance in court will be a highly exceptional experience. They might be there once in their lifetime, or two or three times at most. Now that is a situation where, especially given the fact that the circumstances that bring you to court are usually serious, makes it in any event a difficult experience and I don't know how that can be improved.
I suppose you could put under this heading the sort of general - how shall I put it? - the more general availability of knowledge about people's rights and the legal process, and you could probably also stretch the subject to include the special measures that we took quite late in the term with a view to providing additional assistance to victims, or the family of victims. Previously they had very often gone into court quite unaware of what to expect, or indeed what was expected of them. That, combined with the circumstances of the events that brought them to court, created considerable stress and also uncertainty, and the effort to assist those people did, I think, help. In the end though, it's an unusual process. I remember once appearing as a witness in one of the hearings where I myself broke all the rules of giving evidence [laughs] by trying to do more than answer the direct question. I really felt quite disorientated in terms of the way one should approach the question of examination and cross-examination and so on.
EH In terms of making any change to lawyers' practices such as charging indemnity that they had to take out, those sorts of things, what were these?
TAPE ELEVEN SIDE B BERINSON 123
BERINSON There's quite a lot of work done in that area, both on the basis of the Clarkson Committee Report and also of the approach by the Law Society itself on various matters. Compulsory professional indemnity insurance was in fact introduced as a result of the constant urging of the Law Society at the time. It provided a good protection to clients but only in recent times, say the last six or twelve months, I've noted that the Law Society is seriously debating whether they should go to the government with a request to abolish that compulsory insurance. What is happening in line with all manner of professional indemnity is that claims on the one hand and then resultant increases in insurance premiums on the other, are starting to become a very serious cost issue to the legal profession.
That was one aspect of it. The other aspect went to the basic organisation of the profession. The old Barristers' Board was replaced with what is now called the Legal Practice Board. That deals with all questions of admission and discipline and general regulation of the system. An important element in that change was the introduction of non-lawyer participants.
In respect of charges, I don't think we ever moved away from the position that in the end it was going to be a matter of supply and demand, but we did, for example, introduce some of the measures recommended by the Clarkson Committee to at least require lawyers to make the basis of their charging clear to their clients in advance, and also in particular to make clear to them the availability of review processes in respect of charges. Details of those matters now have to appear on lawyers' bills. It's been interesting to see just how small small print can get, and [laughs] it's reached the ultimate in the case of some of their letterheads. I'm just trying to think whether that required at some stage a regulation to establish a minimum print. But in any event, the advice is there. Frankly I don't see how in an ordinary market-oriented society you're going to go much further than that.
I think I should add one other point related to professional indemnity. I became very concerned about the increase in litigiousness in the community over the period that we were in office, and at the effect that that was likely to have on various professions, including the legal profession, both in terms of their performance and their insurance-driven costs. Because of that I took the initiative to establish a parliamentary committee to look at limiting professional liability, and I notice that that reported after the present government was elected but recommended on a cross-party basis that limitations should in fact be initiated. Max Evans was an important member of the committee from the outset and he's now a minister. I'm very hopeful that he will continue to pursue that matter because otherwise we're going to go down the path of some very undesirable and damaging American practices.
EH In an article you wrote for Brief in 1986, you said: "New sexual assault laws will, I believe, give Western Australia the best such laws in Australia."13 Can I ask you what changes you made and also the advice that you
13Brief, TAPE ELEVEN SIDE B BERINSON 124
received? Perhaps was there the influence of the newly established Women's Advisory Council, particularly on issues concerned with violence against women?
BERINSON They did have a voice but it was only one of many that we took into account. We actually went to the 1983 election with a policy based on a private member's Bill that we had introduced on the subject in the previous Parliament. By the time we got to government and looked at that again, it seemed to me that that Bill suffered from what many private members' Bills suffer from, and that is inadequate professional support which can very often only be provided by a departmental and ministerial structure. So large slabs of that initial Bill were jettisoned, even while retaining its general approach.
We took advice from everyone who was prepared to offer it and in the end came up with an Act which I think has stood the test of time pretty well. Virtually the only controversy which arose, and that I think is pretty minor in the scheme of things, was about the so-called "30-second rapist". That arose from a quite difficult provision relating to a woman's right to change her mind even in the course of the act, and that was probably taken further by the court in the particular case than was intended. Despite the flurry of interest on that case, the Act was not amended and the particular provision has not since caused any difficulty, and I think that's because of the nature of the advice which the Appeal Court gave when it came to hear it.
For the rest, the Act did put aside what had been a fairly artificial division between different forms of sexual assault, and it resulted in a number of acts which previously had come within the lesser category of indecent dealing.... it had the effect of bringing them into the more serious category. It also dealt with sexual assaults on males, which tended to be submerged in the larger problem, and as well as all of that it went to questions of evidence and the ability of the prosecuting authorities to make charges stick.
For some time after the Act was introduced I asked to be kept informed of its effect in practical terms, and there were two positive effects which seemed to remain fairly consistent. In the first place, there was a higher percentage of convictions recorded, but perhaps more importantly, there was a higher proportion of guilty pleas entered. That resulted from the awareness that previous defence devices would no longer work. So I think the results overall were good.
For a variety of other reasons, of course, this legislation came at roughly the same time when there developed an increased willingness of victims to report offences.
END OF TAPE 11 SIDE A TAPE ELEVEN SIDE B BERINSON 125
BERINSON That made it all the more important, I think, that the reform of the sexual assault law was in place.
EH Do you think that this willingness for women to report sexual assault had anything to do with it being easier to give evidence?
BERINSON I think it might have, but I'd have to say that the major reasons were just the greater assertiveness of women about their difficulties generally.
EH The influence of the Women's Advisory Council - it had only been established a year or so but throughout your period as Attorney-General was there an influence coming through from the Women's Advisory Council?
BERINSON Yes, there was. They would approach the government on their own initiative but certainly when any legislation relevant to their functions were being considered we'd make a point of asking for their views. They were always very constructive.
EH I suppose this is a more philosophical question than a law question, but how able is the law to deal with issues like violence against women and how much does it have to be in other areas that it's addressed?
BERINSON Well, it depends whether you're talking about dealing with the consequences of sexual assault or preventing it. [Pause] Penalties for sexual assault are of highly doubtful use as a deterrent. I don't know how you can measure that but I'm not aware of any decrease in sexual offences as a result of the significantly higher penalties which we introduced, for example. Subject to correction, I've got the impression that if anything, sexual offences have increased over the years so I don't think you can solve the problem in that way. Of course, in entirely different respects we took measures to try and tackle problems of domestic violence and of other harassment activities, both by simplifying the procedures for seeking assistance by the courts, and later in the day, by trying to simplify the ability to obtain police assistance in an area which they had always found very difficult to cope with.
But if I had to summarise all of that I'd say that in a sense sexual assault offences are much like all other offences, coming down to car theft or break-and-enters, and that is that we seem to be at a stage where those offences, having gone through the roof in terms of increased incidence in roughly the 1980s and early '90s, while now appearing to plateau in terms of numbers are still at very high and unacceptable levels, and that's a reflection of the way society is behaving.
EH This is totally a different question - the John O'Connor case14; can I ask you to comment on that?
14John O'Connor, Secretary of the Transport Workers' Union was charged with extortion on 17 August 1984. TAPE ELEVEN SIDE B BERINSON 126
BERINSON Yes, that gave me a lot of pain, and I suppose if not for WA Inc would have stayed with me as the major personal difficulty that I faced. It was strange in many ways, not least because the charge was laid at all in an area where people simply weren't charged. John O'Connor was the Secretary of the Transport Workers' Union. He'd come on very heavy against an employer and by means of all manner of threats had succeeded in his aim of obtaining whatever benefit it was that he was looking for on behalf of his members.
Now a problem arose when he was charged because if you just look at the plain terms of the various Acts with these offences, you can find an opening for very serious charges. I forget frankly what the charge in O'Connor's case was, but let's say blackmail: "If you don't do such-and-such I'm going to ruin your business." All right, now that might well fit into some criminal code or Police Act definition of an offence. The problem was that O'Connor hadn't done anything that unions had not been doing for 100 years and which had always been regarded as matters to be dealt with in terms of industrial relations and industrial law, and not by means of criminal sanctions.
In considering that difficult combination there had to be a question of the public interest involved as well, but that had complications of its own: on the one hand there's public interest in the ordinary processes of the criminal law proceeding unhindered; there is another public interest in the processes of industrial law being followed; and there was also a public interest in what was likely to happen if there was a general strike on the subject. That criminal charge posed a very great threat to long-established union practice and the union movement obviously saw that it had to organise in a comprehensive way against it. Now to what extent their threats were empty bluster, I don't know, but personally I would have regarded it as in their basic interest to pursue their opposition to the O'Connor charge very far indeed.
Putting all of that together, I decided that the charge should be withdrawn and I made it very clear that that was a matter of exercising the personal authority and discretion that I had. It was, from memory, the only occasion that I entered a nolle as a matter of my own decision, and every other case, so far as I can recall, was either done by professional officers directly under delegated authority or as a result of professional officers advising me to exercise the authority in that way.
All hell broke loose. It was a very easy target for the Opposition. They were strongly supported by the press. The big question was whether this was to be seen as an improper exercise of authority to cut across the ordinary processes of the criminal law or, as I would naturally try to present it, as an exercise of my authority within the criminal law in precisely the sort of undefined and undefinable area which made the availability of that authority understandable. It was precisely because you can't always anticipate circumstances that justify a nolle that in the end a nominated officer is given the authority to exercise his discretion.
Added to that was the concern that I had, that a continuation of this course of action could lead to innumerable demands, and then innumerable charges, on matters which simply were not appropriate for the criminal law in a society where TAPE ELEVEN SIDE B BERINSON 127
industrial law was well-established and, more than that, where important roles for the various elements of the industrial movement - that is the employees and employers - were well-accepted and an important part of our way of life.
My wrap-up comment, I suppose, would be that it's instructive, in my view, to observe that neither the criminal law, industrial law, or union practice, has significantly changed in all the years since the O'Connor case, but there haven't been any more charges to compare with the O'Connor charge. The only change that has occurred has led to an increased availability of civil processes, damages and so on, as in the "Dollar Sweets" case and the abattoir case in the Northern Territory, but this basic conflict of industrial and criminal law has not changed. As I've observed, there hasn't been another charge under any government so far as I'm aware - Labor or Liberal, Commonwealth or in any other State.
EH I didn't quite understand when you said the "undefinable area". What did you mean by that?
BERINSON Well, there's no Act or practice which says an Attorney- General can enter a nolle prosequi to discontinue an action under such-and-such circumstances or in this or that case; it simply says the Attorney-General has the capacity to withdraw cases. What I'm saying is that authority is granted in such wide terms because it's not possible to anticipate or to define the circumstances where the exercise of that authority might be appropriate.
EH And this was really the only time that you had to exercise that?
BERINSON It's the only time that I did exercise it personally. Now it would have been much more comfortable if the professional officers had indicated that in their view that should be done, or for that matter, as I said, simply exercised their delegated authority. I had a lot of advice on it but in the end the most important advice from my point of view, was by the Solicitor-General and he did not go beyond the point of indicating the clashing considerations and indicated that in the end that it had to be a matter of judgment. That meant, of course, political judgment, and that was the basis on which I proceeded from that point. But certainly I didn't have his support or the advice of any other professional officer that this was a charge that should definitely be dropped.
EH Can we go on now and talk about the style of the Burke Government and together with that the functioning of Cabinet and Brian Burke as leader?
BERINSON That's a very broad subject. It would be helpful if you can break it down a little.
EH We can break it down a bit. Can I break it down to this early period of government, between 1983 and 1985? How Brian Burke established his authority in Cabinet and how Cabinet functioned, the priorities that were set and who the influential people were in Cabinet in these first couple of years. TAPE ELEVEN SIDE B BERINSON 128
BERINSON Brian Burke was a very dominating personality and I think his leadership was readily accepted. He didn't dominate in an overbearing way or by any means other than persuasion, a friendly and supportive approach to ministers, but probably above all by demonstrating that his judgment was very well-attuned to public opinion. Part of his success in that respect was no doubt due to his ability to handle the media, and in many respects to dominate the way in which they came to report on the government's performance. But there's no doubt he proved himself to be a born political leader and he thrived in a position where he had the authority of Premier and also the various support mechanisms which a Premier automatically has. I think all his ministers were free to advance their own special interests. He would sift those for purposes of his own priorities and his political judgment, but it was a very enthusiastic time and a lot of good things were done.
EH I suppose because it's become so controversial over the last couple of years, the Curtin Foundation and the aspects of fundraising, and the good relations with business, particularly the entrepreneuers of the '80s - I suppose, such as Connell and Bond, Roberts. I don't know the others really. These weren't really the expected friends of Labor. What brought this about?
BERINSON Well, I wouldn't know the process but from earliest times, and even in opposition, I think we had reached the point of understanding that the State's potential really depended on an active and successful business community. I think that Brian himself had also developed a view that it was important for the State to maximise the benefits of its resources so as to get out of what is the relative financial stranglehold of the limited State capacity to raise revenue.
Within the party and within government we didn't have the experience or the knowledge of how to go about doing things like that, and I expect that the need to get some advice from people who really understood those matters would have encouraged him to establish contact with active and successful people in the business community. That was linked with his very clear view about the need for political parties to present much more professional (and that means much more costly) election campaigns. So that the need to collect funds at a level that had never even been contemplated before must have also been very much a part of his early thinking.
The unfortunate thing was that the nature of the business in the '80s meant that so many of the prominent and successful, or apparently successful businessmen, were what are now disparagingly referred to as "paper-shufflers", and even in the few names that you've mentioned....
EH I should have said Robert Holmes à Court too, I think.
BERINSON That's right, you should have. Now that, I think, would have come to four names. Of those there's only one, John Roberts, whose business was actually to build things. It's significant that he's still building things and the TAPE ELEVEN SIDE B BERINSON 129
paper-shufflers are no longer shuffling paper. But they were the prominent people at the time and so it was natural both, I think, that they should be approaching the government and that the Premier, in the general context which I've tried to give, would have been interested in hearing what they had to suggest.
EH Was the fact there was a Labor ascendancy in Australia an influence as well, having the Hawke Government in Canberra? Did that make a difference to the attractiveness of Labor to the business world?
BERINSON I think we've really got to wait on Brian's own autobiography to elaborate on that. But there's at least one aspect where I think the answer would have to be yes, and that is that there were many occasions - I shouldn't say many, I can only think of a few - where the State link with the federal government, was used to advantage. You can either put it in State/federal terms, or premier/prime minister terms, or Burke/Hawke terms, because I think that Brian succeeded in a number of occasions in getting advantages for Western Australia (I'm now speaking well beyond the limited - the business question that you were referring to) because of his good personal relationship with the federal government.
Coming back to your narrow question, there's one example which comes readily to mind and that's the establishment of the IBJ bank (the International Bank of Japan) in Perth as its headquarters city, when the federal government moved to deregulation. Although the federal government ended up by deregulating to the extent of allowing every applicant in, its original version of deregulation was based on a limited number of new banks being invited into Australia. Brian seized on that to get federal government agreement to effectively allow him to decide on a successful applicant by agreeing that he could negotiate with overseas banks on the basis that if they agreed to set up their headquarters in Perth, then they could be assured of a licence. He did that with IBJ and he not only got them to agree to come to Perth, which was an important coup, but he also got them to agree, directly or indirectly, to pay $50 million to the State. That was a terrific boost in both respects.
END OF TAPE ELEVEN SIDE B TAPE TWELVE SIDE B BERINSON 131
A further interview with Joe Berinson recorded on 7 July 1994.
EH Joe, just to start off today, I wanted to follow up a few things that happened before 1986 and then we'll go on to the 1986 election. The first thing was the Legislative Council rejected the government's Aboriginal Land Rights Bill. This followed on the inquiry conducted by Paul Seaman into Aboriginal land rights. Were you involved in this at all?
BERINSON Apart from the general Cabinet dealings with this question, I was only involved with it to the extent that it was dealt with at length in the Legislative Council and then defeated. The Premier had pretty well taken personal charge of that question. It was a very difficult and hot issue, and that was both in respect of the Aboriginal expectations on the one hand and the strong industry and community resistance on the other. Brian Burke's judgment, which I think was right, was that whatever was to be attempted should be done quickly. What we had in this case, was both a difficult concept and a need for very substantial and careful drafting of legislation, and in order to give it the impetus which he thought it required, I remember that there were actually three parliamentary draftsmen allocated to the drafting of the legislation rather than the normal one.
So far as I can recall that's the only occasion that a whole team in effect was put on to the job and they did very well to produce this difficult Bill within the severe time constraints that the minister put on them. I'm sure it must have been as frustrating to them as it was to the Premier to then see that go down the drain.
EH There was also - Professor Edwards was appointed as a Royal Commissioner to inquire into deadlocks between both Houses of Parliament. Did you participate in this at all?
BERINSON Again, I participated only in the Cabinet decision to establish such an inquiry. From my position in the Legislative Council (and I think I was still deputy leader at the time) it was very clear that we were going to be facing constant frustrations, and that it would be preferable to find a way of at least making the Council accountable for its rejection of government legislation. The comparison we most often drew was with the Senate where, admittedly under restricted conditions, the Senate could be taken out to an election if it forced the House of Representatives to an election or even if it continued to frustrate legislation which the Federal Government regarded as very important. In our own case the Legislative Council could not back anything that it wished to. It could even force a government to an election by rejecting supply, and all of that while remaining immune itself from any need to go to an election or present itself for public approval or disapproval.
Frankly, the Edwards Inquiry was more a matter of highlighting the issue than a measure taken with any belief that it would lead to reform, and that was for the obvious reason that any reform required the agreement of the Legislative Council TAPE TWELVE SIDE B BERINSON 132 and it was against their nature to do that irrespective of what anyone recommended.
EH Was it correct that the Opposition really didn't participate at all?
BERINSON I'm not sure whether they boycotted the inquiry - I really can't remember - but in any event, I do recall that they were entirely relaxed about the exercise, more or less adopting the basis, "Well, you go ahead and waste your time if you want to, but in the end it's our votes that are going to decide for or against this and we can tell you in advance that any proposal to substantially change the privileged position of the Council isn't going to get through."
EH Actually just while we're on that subject, did you enjoy the argy-bargy of debate and that toing-and-froing of parliamentary processes?
BERINSON I've got a mixed reaction to that. In the early stages of the government, the Opposition were in a sort of shell-shocked condition and we actually got through a number of measures that I would not have expected to pass. They also had not got used to the idea of opposition and as a result they didn't force us to spend too long on measures that we were keen about and they weren't keen about. They just made their position clear and then went to a vote and allowed it through, if that's what they had decided on. But later, even in that first parliament, they got the hang of things a bit better, and that includes the advantage of just wearing ministers down by endless debate and constant argument and questions, especially in the committee stages of Bills.
The longstanding tradition of the Legislative Council was that neither the gag nor the guillotine were applied. It was only when we were in opposition in the period 1980-83, and because of our agreement, that time limits of any sort were placed on speeches. Now the absence of the gag and guillotine in theory wasn't all that significant from our point of view because we didn't have the numbers and we could never have passed a gag or guillotine motion anyway. It's interesting to observe in recent times that the present government with a comfortable majority in the Legislative Council and with nothing to worry about in terms of eventual decisions on Bills, has in fact moved to limit debate.
In any event, getting back to our own position, once the Opposition got the hang of it, they did extend some debates to extraordinary lengths and I must say that's a good tactic. It's very wearing on the energy and the nerves of ministers, and that was especially the case in those days because that was some years unfortunately before we came to understand ourselves that the load on three ministers, which was our maximum in the Council, was just too great. After that we introduced the notion of parliamentary secretaries and that was a great help, but it was only in the last year or two of the government and that was too late.
So yes, it was enjoyable in many respects. I mean it really is a huge change to TAPE TWELVE SIDE B BERINSON 133 come from opposition into government where your opinion can actually lead to something happening - that's very satisfying. On the other hand the position in the Council was always going to be frustrating and as the Opposition got the hang of working on that a bit better it became more and more frustrating, and more and more physically and mentally wearing.
EH The Ashton Diamond Mining joint agreement was in 1983. What was the background to this and why did it become significant later?
BERINSON The Premier from the outset of the government, and I think even in the election platform, had looked to the need to increase the State income out of state enterprises. Ashton Mining had a couple of interesting features, only one of which is normally remembered, but its significance probably does lie in the fact that it was the first occasion on which this theory of the Premier's was put into practice.
I said there were two elements to it: one was extremely successful; the second one was doubtfully successful in revenue terms but looking ahead it could be seen as the precursor of other problems that arose through the mix of government and entrepreneurial activities. Perhaps I should deal with those two issues separately.
The developers of the Argyle diamond field had wanted to get away from the standard practice that had come to be adopted with North-West mineral developments of establishing towns near mine sites. There were many of those - Mount Newman, Tom Price and so on. They wanted to replace that with a system which was then regarded as very radical but has now become widespread, and that is the so-called "fly in/fly out" system where you have a relatively small live-in development next to the mine site and the work force is flown in on a fortnight on/fortnight off basis, or a month on/month off basis, whatever the position is, and have their homes in an established town, which might be either in the North-West or even down in Perth.
That was what the Argyle developers wanted to do and it was very unpopular, both with the North-West community and with the unions in particular. They wanted a town site. Brian Burke saw the merits of the developers' proposals from a commercial point of view but he was very conscious of the unfavourable politics involved. In the end (and this was, I think I'm right in saying, a matter in which he closely involved himself) he came to the conclusion that the fly in/fly out system ought to be approved but that the company ought to pay for that, and he eventually got them to agree to pay the State $50 million in lieu of an obligation to establish the town.
At the time that gave him a lot of difficulties from all sides because the company was very angry at having to comply with that proposal and neither the unions nor the North-West community were satisfied with the outcome. Nonetheless it was, I TAPE TWELVE SIDE B BERINSON 134 believe, a sensible commercial move from the company's point of view and that the Premier should have got that contribution from them towards general State purposes was very satisfactory, I would have thought, from the State's point of view.
EH Now was that the joint agreement? What was the nature of that?
BERINSON Yes, I think that was what the joint agreement was about. Then you came to a second point. I don't know where the initiative for this came, whether it was the Premier's own initiative or from the companies or shareholders, but the Premier then, instead of leaving that money to be used for general State purposes, thought that it would be preferable to get for the State an interest in the diamond operation itself and to have the long-term advantage of the income from that rather than just the straight up-front payment, and that's what led to the purchase of the share in that venture. Now in retrospect it would appear, especially from what the royal commission has had to say, that the people who were concerned in encouraging the Premier into that venture at the price that was eventually agreed on (and I frankly forget what that was) were leading us astray and that we somewhat overpaid.
There was one other feature of that transaction which in retrospect can be seen as unfortunate both for itself and for setting a pattern for later activity, and that was the way in which this process was not regarded as something to be dealt with by the ordinary Cabinet process. As a result, to the extent that Cabinet was involved, that really took the form of being introduced to the project at a Cabinet meeting rather than by means of preliminary circulated papers, and a further result of that process was that the normal advisory opinions from various relevant departments, which flow as a matter of course to formal Cabinet submissions, weren't available on the day.
It was very strange to see from the hearings of the royal commission that whereas I had taken considerable comfort from the fact that the Under-Treasurer was at that Cabinet meeting and, as I understood it, supported the proposal, he later emerged as saying that he didn't know anything about it before the meeting, that he was uncomfortable about it while he was there but that he took comfort from the fact that I seemed to be agreeing with it. That's just a complete foul-up of the process, and especially as it seemed to work anyway, in spite of some people's reservations about overpayment in terms of value. It was unfortunate as leading to somewhat similar lack of process as we came to later proposals.
EH Laurie Connell's role, did he have a role in this?
BERINSON Yes, he did. That may have been the first time, or certainly one of the first times I'd ever come across Connell or even heard of him. He really turned up at that meeting as a salesman for the Bond interest. What was being sold was a Bond interest in the project. TAPE TWELVE SIDE B BERINSON 135
The meeting wasn't conducted like that. He seemed to be there in some sort of advisory capacity. I'm on the record as being very much put off by something he did at the meeting, which was to distribute some cut diamonds from the mines as though we should be impressed by that, that we ought to buy the mine. It's a bit like that man in the Gillette razor ad saying, "I liked the shaver so much I decided to buy the factory." I found that in very poor taste. I described it to the commission as being in the category of showing baubles to the Indians. But the Premier was obviously very keen and confident; as I said, the Under-Treasurer was there and that seemed to add to the strength of the proposal and so it went through.
What I later came to feel was a significant part of that meeting was the fact that as Laurie Connell was leaving the room the Premier called to him to stop just as he was at the door, and said that before he went he wanted Cabinet to know how much he appreciated Laurie's help and he also wanted us all to know that he was offering his assistance without any charge to the State, as though that was something to be grateful for.
I suppose it wasn't until a couple of days later that I came to realise that if he wasn't charging us he was charging someone else and that meant that he wasn't there as an adviser to the government at all, but as a salesman. I wrote to the Premier about that and said that although on the particular deal everything seemed all right and it seemed a reasonable commercial buy, we should nonetheless beware of ever again putting ourselves in the position of taking advice from anyone who was not engaged by us to be an adviser, and paid by us and responsible to us and to us alone.
I'm very confident that Brian Burke simply hadn't thought about that sort of issue or that perhaps he wasn't being advised in the best interests of the State alone, and that could have been coloured by the fact that Connell had associated with his firm and long-time friend of the Premier's in Jack Walsh. Putting all of that together it would appear then that the deal itself was okay, but it was an unfortunate precursor, both in the nature of the activity and particularly in the absence of ordinary process, to some of the problems that emerged later.
EH Was there a reaction from the House, from the Opposition? Were they questioning at this stage?
BERINSON I don't remember and I'd really have to look at the Hansard. I don't think that there was any special difficulty about getting the agreement Bill through. I think it was an agreement Bill, but frankly I don't even remember the nature of the parliamentary participation in this.
EH Just another thing I wanted to go on before the election was the Juries Amendment Bill in 1984. Was this part of the law reform that you were putting through?
TAPE TWELVE SIDE B BERINSON 136
BERINSON Yes, it was. We were working steadily on a series of law reform measures and particularly trying to implement as many as possible of the recommendations of the Law Reform Commission with which we agreed but which had previously languished in various pigeonholes. So yes, the Juries Act was one of those and we brought it substantially up-to-date.
EH What changes did this involve?
BERINSON Oh, it involved a review of the process of selecting juries, a re-evaluation of eligible and ineligible jurors, and the basis on which people could request exemption from jury service. It clarified the position in relation to jury decisions and in a number of diverse ways met problems that had been recognised in individual cases over years but had never been addressed. It was interesting, considering how long it had been before previous amendments of the Juries Act, that once we brought in the new one, we then found that there were still matters that had to be attended to arising from future circumstances.
END OF TAPE TWELVE SIDE A TAPE TWELVE SIDE B BERINSON 137
BERINSON One related to the ability of jurors to sell their story, so to speak, which had become a problem in other States rather than here. Again, right in the very last days of the government, in 1992, we found it necessary to amend the Act to increase the number of reserve jurors from three to six. That was at the request of the Chief Judge of the District Court who was looking ahead to the anticipated very long trial in which Laurie Connell was subsequently involved, and where the chief judge was concerned that the court might face a situation of sitting on a trial for months and then having the process aborted by more than three jurors being unable to carry on. As it happened in the actual case I think they reached the previous maximum of three so it was a cautionary move that was well-justified.
EH I'd like to move on now to the 1986 election. What were the issues that dominated the election and what were your observations of the Opposition at this stage?
BERINSON It would explain what I'm about to say that I don't really remember what the major issues were. I explain that by saying that I think the election was entirely dominated by the strength of the position of Brian Burke as Premier and the great popularity and public support that he had generated during his first term. To that I should add that there was a spectacular election campaign, a real sort of whiz-bang program which was highly professional and practically buried the Opposition in terms of quality, and for that matter, sheer volume. Of course, it's become popular in more recent times to complain about the Premier's fundraising work, and even some prominent members of the Labor Party lay machine have joined in that. I never heard them complaining at the time, and it's one of the many sad factors arising that what appeared then to be the way to go had weaknesses in it that gave rise to so many problems later. I'm not talking even remotely about any question of honesty because I am quite confident myself that the Premier in his dealings with those election funds would always have behaved properly and responsibly from the party's point of view. Whether again his processes were adequate will only emerge in the future.
In any event a combination of his personality and the election campaign, which he was able to mount and which he undoubtedly fashioned, remain in my memory as by far the greatest factors involved in the '86 election and the most significant factors related to our return.
EH And just the role of the Opposition - were they sort of just bowled over by the support the Labor Party had and their own seeming inability to raise the same sort of funds?
BERINSON Yes, I'm sure their morale was badly affected and their prospects had to be affected in turn by that. The Opposition didn't do badly, by the way, in terms of numbers of seats, so in terms of the parliamentary balance the '86 election was really very much a status quo. TAPE TWELVE SIDE B BERINSON 138
EH This is really skipping on, but because it's such a central issue to the period, I want to move on to talk about Rothwells. "Black Tuesday" was 20th October 1987 which saw the drop in the share market, and you said earlier in our discussion when we were talking about John O'Connor that this was the most difficult decision that was made during the whole period. Could you outline the background of the meeting and the decision for the Rothwells' rescue and your participation in what was going on?
BERINSON It all happened very suddenly from my point of view. In fact I only heard about the problem on the morning of the Sunday when a decision to help Rothwells was taken. As I understand the position, no-one else had more than about another day or two in terms of notice of this huge problem, so that everything was pretty well done in a pressure-cooker atmosphere.
By the time that I came to know about it at all, the position had been reached where it was understood that without substantial external support Rothwells would collapse. The fear by the Premier was that because of its very prominent position in Western Australia, the flow-on effect of a collapse would be hugely damaging here. On the other hand, there must have been great concern in the business community generally that the harm wouldn't be restricted to Western Australia but that it could lead to very damaging flow-ons throughout Australia. As a result of all of that a rescue proposal had been drawn up which really relied primarily - or at least this is my understanding of it - on the support of private industry who collectively, by that Sunday, had come to the stage of offering $150 million in support of Rothwells. The sticking point from the State point of view was that that $150 million of support was expressed to be conditional on the State Government further strengthening the assistance that was being offered with $150 million guarantee.
There were two main groups putting the view very strongly that that really didn't involve the State in any real risk, and the reason for that was that the $150 million of commercial support would have had to be lost, as well as Rothwells' own resources, before the guarantee was called on. The two groups that I'm talking about were those associated with Bond Corporation on the one hand, and Wardleys Bank, which was a merchant bank, brought in to advise and assist on the whole project. Both of them pretty well rubbished any suggestion that there was a real risk involved in the State enterprise, but nonetheless it was a big step to take and very worrying. As later emerged, some of the comfort that seemed reasonable on the day to take from events was not well-based. Bond Corp in particular were saying that there was no way they would be putting their own contribution into the commercial pool (their contribution was very significant at $15[?] million) if they thought that there was a serious risk involved. That sounded all right on the day, and in fact for several years, until it emerged that the Bond Corp contribution to the pool was more than fully matched by a fee which they intended to get from Rothwells in return for their support.
TAPE TWELVE SIDE B BERINSON 139
So that was the sort of situation. I heard about it in the morning. I had a couple of people come out from the Premier's office to ask whether I was agreeable. I found it a bit too big and too hard to deal with in that fragmented way and I suggested that either the Cabinet or at least the budget sub-committee of Cabinet should be called together for the purpose, and we had this meeting of as many ministers who could be found with the various parties on that same Sunday afternoon.
There were limited questions involved and they were pursued endlessly. One of the many problems was that within the time available there could not be close evaluation of the real position at Rothwells and, of course, as we later found, the position had been seriously misunderstood by anybody external to Rothwells who had looked at it. The decision had to be taken on that day because otherwise Rothwells couldn't open for business on the following morning and all the feared damage would have occurred.
In the end, I think it's fair to say as I've said elsewhere, that it was the Premier who took the decision and said, "We'll do it," but, as I always add, I think this was one of those rare cases where silence is acquiescence, and that the responsibility for that was certainly shared by all the ministers who were there, and that included myself. On the following day the decision was accepted, if not confirmed, by a full Cabinet meeting and really from that point on I think most of us thought that the problem was solved; it wasn't really raised again in Cabinet. It was only right at the end of the year, or early in January, that I started to hear mention of Rothwells again and I couldn't really quite understand that because there was nothing in public to suggest that the rescue mission hadn't succeeded.
Well, that was really the start of the huge difficulties which the government faced. It was compounded, in my view, by the retirement of Brian Burke as Premier at the end of 1987 and, after a small hiatus period, the appointment of Peter Dowding as Premier in his place. I don't think, in retrospect, there could have been a worse time for a change of leadership, and that's all the more the case because I believe that by that time Brian Burke had come to understand the nature of some of the people that he was dealing with in a way that anyone taking over from him was necessarily going to take too much time to reach.
END OF RECORDING ON TAPE TWELVE SIDE B
END OF INTERVIEW