PARLIAMENTARY HISTORY ADVISORY COMMITTEE

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STATE LIBRARY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA

Transcript of an interview with

Ian Alexander

Birth date/death date

STATE LIBRARY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA - ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION DATE OF INTERVIEW: 1998 INTERVIEWER: Erica Harvey TRANSCRIBER: ERICA HARVEY DURATION: 3 hours REFERENCE NUMBER: OH3084 COPYRIGHT: Parliament of Western Australia & State Library of Western Australia

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. This is an interview with Ian Alexander recorded by Erica Harvey for the Parliamentary Oral History Program and the Battye Library Oral History Collection on the 9th of June 1998 at Ian Alexander's home in Perth, Western Australia.

ALEXANDER Ian Alexander, born in Leeds, England, 1947. Came to Australia in 1951 on the P & O liner the Stratheden.

EH Did you have brothers and sisters? Where were you in the family?

ALEXANDER Middle, Erica. Elder brother who is two-and-a-half years older than I am and a younger brother who was born in Kalgoorlie actually, after we came to Australia in fifty-four - he's six, seven years younger.

EH Could we talk a bit about your parents and your early life? Probably memories of Leeds are not very great.

ALEXANDER No, not very clear - just a few cows walking across a walking track, but I think that's been implanted in the brain by parental stories rather than actual memories.

EH Your parents, what were their occupations and interests, and perhaps your impressions of family life?

ALEXANDER Yes, well my father was a doctor and that's why we came to Australia, because he got a job with the Commonwealth Medical Service. He qualified during the war, I think, where he met my mother who was a nurse - classic wartime romance I guess - and they got married during the war. Yeah, my memories of family life are mixed because there was always a lot of interest in the household and my father would bring home sort of interesting issues and/or people, with him quite often, and they were certainly interested in sort of issues outside of just domestic ones. So I guess there would quite often be discussion at the dinner table, particularly of a weekend, about sort of contemporary issues; but I do remember my father got increasingly conservative as he got older. He died in the late sixties, at which time he was fifty-five, but he'd gone from being very radical when he was in England - I don't have memory of that of course - but to quite conservative by the time that he established himself in medical practice here and became a private pathologist, which probably influenced the way he looked at the world. We occasionally talked about politics, he and I, but he was more concerned that I should get on with my school work, which I wasn't very keen to do at various times, so I have a lot of memories about discussions - or heated discussions - about that sort of thing as well.

EH Migration - do you know why the decision to immigrate, and why Australia - Western Australia particularly?

TAPE ONE SIDE A ALEXANDER 2

ALEXANDER Western Australia I think they ended up in by chance. Australia I guess, because there were opportunities. My father, I think this must have reflected his increasing change politically, became concerned about the British medical service which was nationalised - or the National Health was set up wasn't it just after the second war, I think - and he didn't particularly like the impact it was having on the medical system, so he started to look elsewhere and I think at the time Australia was running a big recruiting campaign for migrants and they joined that. My father had to go to Sydney, where we joined him, and he flew out, and we came out by boat - me and my two brothers - no only one at the time - because he had to do a course in tropical medicine. And then, of course, bureaucrats being what they are, sent him to the desert in Kalgoorlie - far from the tropics where he couldn't practise any of his newly learnt skills - but he worked in the Commonwealth health laboratories in Kalgoorlie for two or three years, then met a medical practitioner in Perth who subsequently became his partner, when the family moved to Perth. So I think it was chance that we ended up in Western Australia rather than design - although I guess the choice of Australia was more deliberate than that.

EH Ian your mother, what interests did she follow?

ALEXANDER Well, she wasn't in the paid work force by the time we got to Australia. She gave up work as nurse I think probably about the time they got married - as most women did at the time. I know it was a bit of a culture shock for her coming to Australia from England. She was in her thirties at the time and had spent all of her life up to then in England, and particularly ending up in Kalgoorlie on the edge of the desert. She was mainly preoccupied I guess with bringing up three boys - who probably took up an awful lot of time and energy - and she set up a beautiful environment for us; but later on she went back to work as a librarian at the school we were at, actually, and worked there part time for a number of years, and then went in to other sort of community-oriented activities - Save the Children fund and those sorts of things that were quite active locally.

EH How long were you in Kalgoorlie?

ALEXANDER Only three years. Yes, so I was six, or seven, when we came down to Perth.

EH Early memories of - I guess it's a sense of time and place from your childhood - have any of these stayed with you and influenced you, particularly as you later went on to do geography.

ALEXANDER Yes, I think - I mean Kalgoorlie, to a small extent - although again, the memories are fairly, you know, scant - because I was so young when we were there - but I guess it was sort of a relatively remote town, a fairly tough town, just little fragments of memories of miners and mines, and cycling actually, I did a lot of cycling in Kalgoorlie. TAPE ONE SIDE A ALEXANDER 3

My father rode a bike at the time, so that probably sparked an early interest in sort of, other than car transport, which remains until today. And then I think in Guildford, where I was brought up - the family lived in Guildford - it was almost like living in the country really, because it was a distant suburb. We were surrounded by rivers and there was quite a bit of river land where you could get free access to - a great place to be a kid, or a young boy anyway with those sort of outdoor interests and a bunch of contemporaries who were all interested in running around and exploring the environment. So that I suppose gave me a bit of an interest in the natural environment. I ended up doing geography, I think, not so much because of that but because it was one of the few subjects I really took to at school and had a geography teacher in the upper secondary anyway, who was really keen on pushing students, and so geography was then one of the subjects I took on when I went to university, although I didn't really know what I wanted to do with geography or with any of the other subjects that I took - history, English and something else. Geography again came through as a subject that I did best in, so I thought "Well, why not?"

EH Where did you go to school?

ALEXANDER Guildford Grammar - yes I have mixed memories of; very authoritarian regime and I didn't really enjoy the cultural experience of Guildford at all - very authoritarian, very hierarchical - and apart from people like the geography teacher I mentioned, and a few others like Bill Bunbury who taught me English in my later years at school, they were a pretty dull and uninspiring lot of teachers, and often not very well qualified to do the job. They appeared to be people who couldn't get jobs in the State system - I might be maligning them - but ended up at private schools like Guildford. So the myth was that you get a superior education, I think actually that the opposite was probably true. But my parents thought they were doing the right thing by sending me there, and my brothers, and I guess it did ... Guildford has this sort of philosophy of supposedly of encouraging people to serve the community. I've always resisted the notion that they might have pushed me in a particular direction because I didn't enjoy the experience of being at school for all those reasons - bullying and very uncivilised behaviour - but possibly that might have struck a chord somewhere and sort of opened my eyes to the fact that there were things that you could do in the community - beyond oneself and one's family sort of thing. My parents were also quite active with voluntary groups all the time that we were at school I think.

EH What type of voluntary groups?

ALEXANDER Well, in mother's case there was the Save the Children Fund - there was a strong branch in Guildford at the time - and later on she took an interest in Amnesty International; and my father in medical associations, Liberal Party and politics. He and my mother both were in the parents and friends - very active there and they always seemed to TAPE ONE SIDE A ALEXANDER 4 have a bundle of letters for us to stuff in envelopes to send out to various parents and other organisations they were working with.

EH The question of religion, Ian, did it play a part in your family life? It certainly would have played a part at Guildford Grammar School.

ALEXANDER Yes, well it was forced on you there, you had no choice but to attend chapel every morning, and because I was a chorister of sorts I had to go to chapel on the weekends as well; I was a day student whereas boarders probably had to go even more often than that. I only lived just around the corner from school. Yes, it played a significant part in my youth and I became [quite a little Christian for a while]. My parents made a deliberate decision not to have any of us baptised, partly because my father was Jewish, and although he didn't practise the religion it made him sort of sceptical of any religion, I think; when he rejected Judaism he didn't take on anything else.

EH Did he grow up in an orthodox or traditional household himself?

ALEXANDER Not an orthodox Jewish family; they were Reform Jews, but certainly quite a strict adherence to the formal aspects of religion, and his father was certainly very active in the Jewish community in South Africa where he was brought up in Cape Town.

EH So where had they come from originally?

ALEXANDER Various branches of the family but on my father's side, Rumania and Poland in the nineteenth century, and then one branch of the family went to South Africa and another one went to America, escaping the Pogrums we understand, and my father's grandfather on his mother's side, was actually a Rabbi who was quite notable - Schechter who was sort of a well known figure in American-Jewish history and British-Jewish history, and my father's father was very prominent in the Jewish religion in South Africa as a lawyer and a politician - none of which I knew much about when I was a child but found out subsequently those things that must have influenced the way I've become involved in various things I guess as well. My mother - she used to go to the local church in Guildford occasionally - and sometimes more frequently - so she was more religious than my father really.

EH Which branch?

ALEXANDER Anglican. She'd encourage us to sort of participate, and me and my brother both got confirmed I think in early secondary school years. I attended the local church when I left school for probably twelve or eighteen months, but then just got fed up with what I thought was too much organised religion and rather hypocritical attitudes from some people in the church, I thought, about the things they were telling TAPE ONE SIDE A ALEXANDER 5 you not to do they appeared to be doing themselves. At that point I thought, "No, this is not for me."

EH We've discussed religion, what about politics? You have mentioned that your father became more conservative, but you did have a grandparent who was interested - who was a member of Parliament, is that right?

ALEXANDER Yes, that was my grandfather on my father's side, father's father. Yes, he was a member of Parliament in South Africa for many years - most of his working life I think in fact, after he qualified in law; and he was also at the time part of a small minority group that was trying to get the Government to - this was the 1910 to 25 era, I think - recognise rights for non-whites, which of course took years and years to be resolved. They weren't so much at that stage concentrating on the blacks but on the Indian population and other non-whites who were excluded from all sorts of institutions in the same way that blacks were for years. So my grandfather was part of that reform movement to try and open up the political system a bit. I heard a little bit about that when we were children.

EH Did you know him?

ALEXANDER No, never met. He died when I was - in fact I think he died before I was born, yes, my mother showed me letters, just recently actually, from him, just after my elder brother was born. But they did talk about him from time to time - although my father because he'd made a deliberate decision to shun the Jewish religion wasn't on particularly good terms with his father when he died. So my mother kept up the correspondence - and occasionally that would come into family conversation. Politics in the home - there wasn't . . . I mean my father and mother actually I think both joined the local branch of the Liberal Party - my mother probably now would, like me, be horrified at the thought, because she's got much more radical as she's got older - and so we were conscripted to hand out how-to-vote cards. I remember when I was sixteen handing out how-to-vote cards for the Liberals in a State election and we used to ... We did sort of get into it 'cause I remember devising a game with a friend where we actually had a mock election and get people from the street to come in and take a how-to-vote card and cast their vote, and so I don't know how unusual or otherwise that was, but obviously there was some sort of interest in the political process, even though it was very ill-formed I think in the mind at that stage.

EH Ian, you were going to say a little more about education and we could follow on then with your tertiary education and how that developed.

ALEXANDER Okay, fine. I was just thinking really that the authoritarian nature of the school I went to at Guildford I think had some influence on the attitudes later on because I remember by the time I came TAPE ONE SIDE A ALEXANDER 6 to leave school - I did an extra year because I was too young to go to university; they put me up a class, not because I was bright but because they didn't have enough teachers in the lower school to cope with three of us who came in at a particular time. So I ended up doing an extra year at school where I explored other subjects, which actually was probably the best year of my school life because we were doing non-compulsory subjects that you wouldn't normally get the opportunity to do. But even so I remember writing an editorial in the house magazine at the end of the year about a dispute between the rights of day boys and boarders and getting ticked off for it, as you would expect in that sort of atmosphere. I was lucky that they let it through at all, I suppose. But that sort of started to open my eyes to, well, what could you say to a system that you disapproved of and what would be the reaction of the authority once you did so? I mean it was fairly mild looking back, it was fairly uncritical, but at the time I thought I was being very daring and it caused a little bit of a stir. So I think that sort of alerted me to the way in which you can tackle sort of power hierarchies and the influence - good and bad, maybe bad - I think they can have on you.

EH Was there military training too?

ALEXANDER Yes, there was. I was in cadets, as everybody was; it was compulsory, and I hated that because I was no good at marching, or drill, or shooting rifles, or carrying rifles - 'cause I was quite small at the time - I grew a bit later on, but when I first went into cadets I was tiny, I think - and I just hated it. For people who didn't suit that sort of activity, until I later found an alternative, became a - went into the Q store and started dolling out the blankets - that was a great job, but until then I really didn't enjoy it at all; felt quite marginalised by not being good at the things you were supposed pick up as skills.

EH And your university education, was that liberating?

ALEXANDER Yes, I guess it was really, because all those strictures of hierarchy suddenly disappeared, and I was still at home, so while there was the sort of discipline framework there, at uni, I suppose, like a lot of kids of our generation, I probably went a bit crazy, and in my first year didn't work particularly hard, but had a great time. Met lots of really interesting people; went to lots of fantastic parties; got far too drunk for a youngster, etc, etc. So, yes, it was a real opening up of experience for me. From a, I mean, relatively secure but quite protected childhood, despite that exposure to the violence, or the violent side of school, yes, I hadn't struck anything so - liberating I think is the word - as the university environment.

EH Because you would have been in a single sex school for all those years.

ALEXANDER Yes, quite so, and with great trouble relating to the opposite sex as a result of that I think. So yes, that was part of it; just TAPE ONE SIDE A ALEXANDER 7 being able to talk to girls one-to-one rather than having to contrive a situation. It took me years to actually learn that - well, probably never did - the real skills.

EH Did you go straight through uni and on to a PhD? Did you start to really gather enthusiasm, I guess I'm asking, for the courses you were doing?

ALEXANDER I did go straight through; I guess most of us did at that time didn't we, whereas now the kids seem to take it much more by bits and pieces. I happened to get interested in geography; we had a rather inspiring lecturer in the department at the time - Martyn Webb - still keep [in] touch with him from time to time; but the one really good thing about him as an undergraduate he generated a huge amount of enthusiasm, and he was particularly interested in urban geography and planning. So I'm sure that was an influence in my decision to pursue that side of the subject. I also remember going to a meeting at that time, because I was working after my second year, I think, for a town planning consultant - got a part time job probably through Martyn Webb in the holidays - and they subsequently took me to a meeting out at Guildford, which was about planning the future of the suburb, and Gordon Stephenson, who I subsequently got a great admiration for and we had quite a good dialogue over the years about planning and politics, he was there and really opened my eyes up to how planning operated and what you might be able to do through the planning process at a local community level. So that really sparked my interest in, well not just urban geography, which I loved, but also the possibility of applying it to real world situations or problems. I went to honours without too much encouragement, because I wanted to go on and study various things, and then was lucky enough to get a first class honours - I say that because I was the only honours student in that particular year, so they couldn't look bad by giving me a second, so they had to say, "Oh yes, geography's got a first class student here." So I was lucky enough to get a first and that gave me a scholarship to do a masters at UWA and I did that on the city centre - very much a rather didactic land use study, looking back on it now, thirty years later; but I really loved it at the time and it started to alert me to some of the issues I subsequently pursued - like power distribution, who was responsible for the new development that was going in the city. I looked at the land use change and the recent developments and there was a huge spate of office development in the sixties, as there often is, and I started to think of it, "Oh well, who owns the land that that's going on? Whose putting the money in? What impact is it having on other activities in the city?". To me it seemed like the offices which were racing ahead, were displacing everything else, including residential population and shops and warehouses and all sorts of other things which seemed to be getting pushed out by the rising land values. That I think alerted me to the inequalities in the land use pattern and in the land market and between different people. So that sort of became the real theme of both my research and political activity later on.

TAPE ONE SIDE A ALEXANDER 8

EH This links so strongly with the politics, but perhaps we should just leave that for a moment and come back to it, and take up your PhD.

ALEXANDER What I did after my masters, when I finished my masters here - again because of my good honours result I was lucky enough to get a Hackett scholarship which took me overseas to England and I did a town planning course there in London, which was a master of philosophy. I had the choice, I guess at UWA of extending my masters to a PhD or doing something more applied and I'd decided because of my growing interest in planning issues that while academic geography was very interesting, I wanted to try and apply it to some of these problems I was starting to see existed. So I decided to do a planning course - my wife at the time and I wanted to go overseas anyway, so we travelled and did two years at a university college in London where I met a fascinating group of students; there was only 25 students coming in each year, but at that stage overseas student fees were much lower than they are now, so people could afford to come from all parts of the world in Britain. There were people from South Africa who actually had connections with a Jewish background similar to my father's family, which was fascinating, and I still keep touch with them vaguely from time to time now; there were people from other parts of the UK, from the United States, from Africa, from Hong Kong - you know, all over - and from a wide variety of disciplines; geography, sociology, mathematics, anthropology, economics, you name it, they were all there - architecture - and a couple of other Australians I hadn't met previously. So it was a great melting pot of backgrounds and ideas and a lot of quite radical ideas that I hadn't come into contact with before.

EH That sounds so exciting.

ALEXANDER Yes, it was great.

EH Do you think that interdisciplinary - it's cross-cultural as well -

KOOKABURRAS Laughing.

EH That cross-cultural and cross-disciplines that you were studying-

ALEXANDER Yes, it was a real eye-opener; because I mean going through and specialising in one subject and one part of one subject - geography - that was an exciting experience but it was rather narrowing; and then all of a sudden it went broader. I met people from different countries - well okay, we'd had a few Singapore students at my school, but no exposure really to other cultures other than other migrant kids. So it was fascinating to me, people from other backgrounds and cultures on the one hand, and also the whole philosophy of the school was almost chuck them in at the deep end - sink or swim. There were a lot of TAPE ONE SIDE A ALEXANDER 9 complaints in the early part of our course about "Why wasn't it better organised?" and "Why didn't they spend more time organising our assignments and so forth?", but when we had a meeting with the staff they just said, "Well this is our . . . It's not because we're slack, we just believe that you should find your own way once you're through a degree or two" - as most of us had from elsewhere. So we learnt a lot by structuring our own timetable on projects and our own goals almost, in certain parts of the course where they structure them even [more] than others. While that was frustrating in one sense, coming to terms with . . . dealing with a wide group of people with different backgrounds and totally different outlooks, it was really exciting on the other hand.

EH Did you stay on in England and work? What was your next move?

ALEXANDER No, I didn't. I did my thesis on another sort of - I fell back on to a familiar subject; I did it on city centre development - but having done the thesis in Perth on land use, but what I tried to do in London, and that's where it became more exciting, was look at a controversy at the time in Covent Garden, because there was a big plan to redevelop all of that area, if you remember, and there was a lot of controversy in the community about it, and my supervisor was very active in the opposition to that particular redevelopment plan which was really going to flatten a lot of historic and social fabric of Covent Garden and replace it with high rise and roads all around. So I became exposed to that sort of community opposition movement and did my thesis sort of trying to evaluate the comprehensive plan against a community plan for less ambitious but more human scale redevelopment and I sort of did a technical cost benefit type analysis of it, which was actually quite interesting and I believe even useful in the inquiry. There was a public inquiry into it and they looked at the advantages and disadvantages of different options, and mine was used as one piece of evidence. So that was quite exciting. It also happened that back home Martyn Webb was keen to get me back to Perth because he liked my masters thesis; it had been well received and got a good grade, so he wanted to get that published, and I thought, "Oh there's no chance of that happening", but some how he managed to talk the University Press of WA - this was in the early seventies - into publishing it. They had a bigger budget in those days for obscure works like that. So he offered me a tutoring job back here, if I came back to tutor for a year or two, and wrote my thesis into a book for publication. We were both homesick anyway, by that time, even though we'd only spent two years away; done a lot of travelling in the holiday periods and so on. So we came back to Perth for about a year and a half where I worked as a tutor in the same department I'm working in now, and wrote my thesis up for publication.

END OF TAPE ONE SIDE A TAPE ONE SIDE B ALEXANDER 10

EH Ian, just before we finish with your academic career, did you do a PhD?

ALEXANDER Yes, when I was in Canberra, but it was only by chance, because they happened to have a regulation [allowing PhD by published work] at the university. A got a research fellowship at the ANU, after I'd been working in Sydney for a few years in the planning area. I fairly soon got cheesed off with the real world - or what I saw of it -

EH Who did you work for?

ALEXANDER I worked for a firm of consultants called Urban Systems Corporation, who recruited optimistic or sort of naive young planners, like me. George Clark, the boss, did a sort of continuous circuit of the country recruiting people from universities and other places, who he was put on to, in this case, by Martyn Webb again - and I did want to work in planning. They did a lot of work on city centre stuff, which was why I was recruited; they were working on the central plan for Adelaide, or plan for central Adelaide, at the time, and also the plan for central Sydney. So I worked with them for a while but found consultancy frustrating in that it was - well it appeared to be all about getting at the authorities or the council for which the consultants were working, becoming PR agents for them. They were using the planning system as a way of increasing their public popularity basically. It was an eye-opener because I could see that interaction between power politics and planning.

EH This must have related to the work you did at the council and then subsequently in Parliament.

ALEXANDER Yes, I guess it did. It was a very formative experience really, because, yes, there were similar sorts of pro development attitudes on the Perth City Council when I joined ten years after that; and although they weren't quite as sophisticated in using the planning process the way they did in Sydney and, to a lesser extent, in Adelaide, there were parallels definitely. I found it very pressured and then you were constantly pushed from one job to another without really having time to finish your research; and while the firm paid lip service to research, I was employed as a researcher and planner, I think, and paid far too much - it was the carrot to move. He sort of said, "Well what are you earning now?". I said something like at the time, "$6 000 as a tutor"; he said, "Right, I'll double it. Is that okay?" You know, to a young person wanting to go into planning, how could you say no - and it gave us another opportunity to see another city, Sydney, that I hadn't been - well apart from those few months as a kid - hadn't been to before. It was also at a time in the early seventies when Gough Whitlam was in power and he, of course, had a big urban agenda. He was very keen on city and regional planning, and so I started to read and listen to what he was saying, and actually joined the Labor Party just before I left Perth at the end of seventy-three, after they'd won the election. I was aware of the urban and regional agenda because it tied with my own research interests, and TAPE ONE SIDE B ALEXANDER 11

George Clark who recruited me, was actually also working - they had commission from the Federal Government so I got to work on a few jobs that were sort of relevant to Whitlam's city policy - and that was quite exciting; although I then met other people who were working directly for the Government in Canberra, and that struck me as more interesting - and although I didn't end up doing that, I did end up going to Canberra to do research work and met some people who arranged for me to do some consultancy work on my own in Sydney for, what was called the Cities Commission then - an arm of the Whitlam bureaucracy - so I was able to leave the consultancy after the eighteen month contract period expired - I left on the day it expired and I was very glad to leave - but was lucky enough to have another contract to go to for another couple of years; and then went to Canberra and back into research work at the ANU.

EH What was the subject of your PhD?

ALEXANDER Well, that was on the dispersal of office employment in Sydney, really, which I'd started researching before I got there and then continued when I was there; and what are the implications of moving large numbers of office employees - as the Government of the day wanted to do - out of the city centres, which were expanding very rapidly, into suburban centres where they might be more accessible to people; but there might be trade-offs in terms of loss of efficiency or, particularly - my research suggested that while it would be good to have jobs closer to people in the suburbs, immediately you move jobs from the city centre to a suburban centre - even in a city sell served by public transport like Sydney or Melbourne, the vast majority of people drive to work in the suburbs. In Sydney and Melbourne most go by public transport to the centre - the implication was that you get much more road traffic from moving jobs out of the city to the suburbs; other researchers were finding parallel things at the time. So that particular policy of the Government was a two-edged sword, we concluded.

EH Through this period, were your own political interests developing? It was a radical period at the time - the Vietnam war, your travelling and study.

ALEXANDER Slowly they were. Because I was called up when I was twenty, I became probably more aware of the issue of the Vietnam war than I otherwise would have done. Fortunately for me, I failed the medical test - like about half of the recruits to National Service did - I was very grateful to a mildly bad back at the time. Even so, there was that personal interest in not going to Vietnam; I certainly didn't want to go and fight a war which nobody seemed to believe in of our generation anyway, and took part in a few of the early Vietnam marches here in Perth before going to London. I wasn't really politically involved in London, formally, but there was an awful lot of political talk amongst the students and I saw my research as a political - not a political act, but it would certainly have political implications because it was sort of researching the benefits of the community approach versus the top down imposed approach, which the TAPE ONE SIDE B ALEXANDER 12

Government was favouring in Covent Garden; and then joined the Labor Party when we got back to Perth because Whitlam's "It's Time" campaign really struck a chord with me, as it did with most others in our generation.

EH So many Australians came back at that time.

ALEXANDER Yes, that's true - from overseas. We just happened to come back by chance, but a lot did deliberately, yes. I was active in the Labor Party in Sydney, but not particularly so; I just joined the local branch, went to a few meetings and conferences, but because I was busy working, I suppose, and at home, I didn't find the time for it at that stage.

EH Did you have young children at this stage at all?

ALEXANDER No, not until later when we moved to Canberra; the kids were both born in Canberra where again I was sort of marginally active in the Labor Party, but actually got more active through a local community campaign against a nearby freeway that was going to go on the hills of Mt Ainslie. We happened to live near Mt Ainslie at the time, above Canberra; our house wasn't above Canberra, but Mt Ainslie certainly is, and the Planning Commission in Canberra wanted to put through a freeway, through the foothills, right through one of their reserves, which seemed crazy, not just because it would muck up the local environment for people in that suburb, but because it would again encourage more cars on the road as well as do a lot of environmental damage. So a big campaign got going against that, and by chance I got sort of the job of talking to the media and sort of became the media spokesperson for the group after a couple of public meetings; and enjoyed it and seemed to do it reasonably well. So that alerted me to the - well both the way in which community causes can be advanced by the media; and because we were, I suppose looking back, a fairly elitist group of professionals who were working on this community opposition to the freeway, we were able to match the planners at their own game - and for every move they made, we thought we were outsmarting them. We got the road project deferred - maybe more by the fact that they were starting to run out of money by that time than anything else, but we felt that our community campaign had had quite an impact on the planning - the way in which they approach things. So that sort of was quite an influential experience of, well, exposing me to the community politics really.

EH Could you say that your political philosophies and ideas were developing and evolving through this experience, or were there people that influenced you?

ALEXANDER Just talking to other local residents there was probably more influential. There was also quite a . . . There was a radical stream running through the literature I was starting to read at the ANU; not so much for my thesis which became a little bit overly technical - PhD wasn't a thesis it was a collection of publications but they were all - well they were political in tone at the beginning; they fairly quickly got into a TAPE ONE SIDE B ALEXANDER 13 technical analysis of the problem - but I was aware of a radical stream of urban literature that sort of was running through the seventies and early eighties; and certainly when I got back to Perth - after moving back to Perth from Canberra - I became more interested in Marxist literature, in particular, and how that could be applied to urban studies. So I had that sort of . . . my views, or the stuff I was writing on an academic front, turned from being fairly mildly critical of the system to be much more entrenched criticism of the system, and I suppose I became a sort of a neo-Marxist for a while - in academic terms - although I could never quite link that up with where I sat in the political spectrum in the Labor Party, which by that time I was more involved in Labor politics, when we got back to Perth. Well, I suppose that encouraged me to seek out and subsequently join the left faction of the Labor Party.

EH Was it sort of a natural move to the left do you think?

ALEXANDER Yes, I think so. I like to think of it that way. It was the faction which appealed to me most philosophically, because I thought even in the early eighties that the Labor Party was showing signs of drifting away from its traditional sort of left wing orientation; and that appeared to be mainly due to the activities of the Right wing who were much more pragmatic and very good at selling the party, but not very good at implementing the party's platform, which still in the early eighties was reasonably radical. But there was still a bit of a gap between my neo-Marxism, if you like, and the political activity. I couldn't quite get the link right and I never really openly brought in the Marxist stuff into my political analysis at that stage - not formally anyway.

EH Have you done it subsequently?

ALEXANDER In bits and pieces, yes, but not systematically.

EH When did you come back to Perth?

ALEXANDER The end of 1980. I got a job at the Institute of Technology, as it was then, in Bentley, in the Town Planning School.

EH And you joined the Highgate branch?

ALEXANDER Yes. I joined Highgate just after we got back to Perth, because my first marriage broke up at that point. We came back to Perth in a vain attempt to save it, but it didn't work, unfortunately, but at least we were in the same city and so I could continue to see the kids. I guess I had more time on my hands and I was in a new location and I met a few people at Curtin - or WAIT as it was then - who encouraged me to get involved in local Labor politics, and I happened to end up joining the Highgate branch because I lived there at the time - actually renting a house from a lecturer at WAIT who was very much into the Marxist literature himself and who organised a Capital reading group, so over those three years - eighty-one, eighty-two, eighty-three - we worked our TAPE ONE SIDE B ALEXANDER 14 way through, in a reading group, Das Kapital - and it was three volumes. I never would have done it without that reading group.

EH You're one of the few people who've read it all.

ALEXANDER I can't remember much of it now! It was really good, actually. It was a very stimulating experience intellectually and helped, again, open up my mind to the sort of the radical, or the connections between radical literature and politics.

When I joined the Labor Party, and subsequently the left wing faction, there was at least in parts of the left and certainly in parts of the union movement, an explicit recognition of Marxism or a Marxist-type view of society, and although that was fading out of the Labor platform for obvious reasons by that time - wasn't judged to be electorally appealing or even philosophically correct by then by those in the know, the power hierarchy - still at the grassroots level there was a view that said, "Well, we ought to recognise the sort of fundamental cleavages between capital and working class sort of thing for purposes of policy formulation"; and at least you could have an intellectual discussion along those lines with people in the left of the Labor Party, whereas in other factions they would just pooh pooh it completely and say "That's just not at all relevant to where Labor is in the eighties."

EH It's very interesting, because there would've been a whole shift away from Communism - socialism, wasn't it.

ALEXANDER Oh yes, absolutely. Socialism and State ownership or State involvement in economic or even social policies, so I suppose yes, by the time the early eighties came the people like Burke and others in charge of the Western Australian party sort of just pooh poohed anything that had socialist pretensions, by saying something like, "Of course, we're all socialists at heart but" you know, "We've got to get ourselves elected, and we have to stay in power." All of which is true, but - and it alerted me to the difficulties of, like belonging to what essentially really the ALP, by then anyway, was a reformist party; it wasn't a real radical party, but sort of thinking . . . I never really inquired about the Communist Party or other more radical parties at that time, believing without really finding out the facts that they were sort of doomed to be totally ineffective; and so I guess once I was in the Labor Party I was of the view that you should just try and keep it as close to the left as you could, and that I suppose was what the Left wing faction, at least in theory, was all about; in practice it tended to get overtaken by careerists - as the party itself did.

EH Let's talk about the Highgate branch for a minute. Did you have sympathetic members?

ALEXANDER Yes. Well I guess there was quite a strong grassroots, sort of leftist type of tone to the whole of the Highgate branch. It formed as a break away from the Perth branch, which was under the control of TAPE ONE SIDE B ALEXANDER 15 the then member for Perth, Terry Burke, Brian's brother, who was very pragmatic and non-socialist, I think, in his approach; and certainly he ran the local Perth branch, not so much as a policy discussion forum, as a way of getting himself troops on the ground to get re-elected. He was very effective as a local politician but he didn't really get much into policy.

EH We'll come back to Terry Burke because you actually stood in the by-election after he resigned.

ALEXANDER Yes, that's right.

EH He'd been the member since 1968 so he must have been very entrenched.

ALEXANDER Oh, he was. Very popular; he was a very good grassroots politician at that level. He did things for people that they appreciated and so he was probably a good local member in terms of getting attention to people and trying to solve their innumerable problems and he had a very - well almost American-like party structure; I think came out of Boston and mixed with the Irish approach - precinct captains and all that sort of thing - so he had a very strong structure of precinct bosses, a distribution system for pamphlets - none of this giving it to couriers, as we might do today, but you give it to your precinct boss who would give it to the people who looked after a particular block and they would distribute the pamphlets around in no time at all.

EH So when you mention Boston, was there links with the old Irish Catholic Labor roots for Terry Burke, back through his father?

ALEXANDER Well I think so; I've never really explored that, but that's what people said at the time, that they'd got these ideas from a variety of sources including the Boston and Chicago Democratic Party and the Irish in America. So certainly there was a strong Irish influence in the ALP here, too, wasn't there. Yes, I suppose on the one hand we admired Terry Burke's sort of very good grassroots organisation, but on the other hand deplored his down playing of policy. When everything came up for discussion at the Perth branch he said, "Oh we're not interested in policy; we leave that to other forums." So Alannah MacTiernan and a small group of others formed a break away branch at Highgate where they lived at the time, and where I happened to end up living myself, and so when I found that group of people I felt immediately at home, philosophically and politically - although there were disagreements on how far to the left the branch should go, as it were, but there was generally much more sympathetic ground for developing radical ideas than I'd found in any other branch I'd been part of.

EH So there was Alannah MacTiernan - was Frank Donovan also a member of that group?

TAPE ONE SIDE B ALEXANDER 16

ALEXANDER No, he was a member of the Morley branch, but in frequent touch with it because he and I were both working at WAIT at the time, so there was quite a network of people working at WAIT and involved in various branches of the party around the metro area who kept in touch by workplace conversations. Then it was again, more or less by chance, that I ended up standing for local politics, because the branch at the time was interested in local political issues - and that was their way of working through the radical agenda by saying, "Well we've got a local council that's very dominated by conservative business people." We wanted bigger Labor influence on that council, but particularly we wanted bigger grassroots Labor influence, because some of the councillors were nominally Labor, or at least had Labor links - they'd never admit it at the time - but they were also business people who gave their first - or so it appeared to us - their first priority to business interests rather than residents' interests. So the branch wanted to get more residents with a radical view on to council, and I just happened to be sitting next to Alannah at the time and said, "Oh, that sounds interesting" - because of my previous experiences we've talked about. I was interested in that sort of possibility of representative politics anyway, and so the whole thing started from there.

EH What year did you stand for the Perth City Council?

ALEXANDER 1982, and I remember when my nomination was put in to the party - because the branch thought and I agreed that I should be like not just a local resident standing but a local resident who was a member of the Labor Party - but at the time the prevailing view in the party was if you stood for council, even if you were a member of the Labor Party, you shouldn't say so.

EH This is the idea that councils were non-political.

ALEXANDER That's right - and should be seen to be so - and even though Terry Burke had friends on the council who were obviously linked to the Labor Party, they wouldn't ever say so openly; and we thought this was just a cover-up for shonky business actually - which it may or may not have been, but it was in some cases. But I remember actually going up to Parliament House with a friend of mine who was helping me on the campaign and taking up this issue of we wanted a Labor nomination, you know; so we wanted the party to endorse me as a local candidate. Terry Burke, who was up at Parliament House at the time we went to see him, he was opposed to this, so we thought we'd try and sort it out and I remember him calling Brian over - who happened to be just walking past his office at the time - saying, "Hey Brian, come over here and listen to this guy. He’s absolutely naïve,” and I thought, "You bastard". So he told the story, you know, "Ian's been nominated by the Highgate branch and they want to make him an official candidate - are they all stupid?", and Brian just said, "Yes. I've never heard anything so silly in all my life." He said, "You might be a member of the Labor Party but you don't announce that if you want to stand for council", and just walked off. So that was it; TAPE ONE SIDE B ALEXANDER 17 there was no way I was going to get Labor nomination if Brian Burke had spoken. But nonetheless on the pamphlet the local branch still put its stamp, and so that was the local branch's act of defiance against the central directive; and I got on to council quite easily in the end - not by a huge number of votes, because I think there was only a thousand people voted out of four or five thousand in the ward - but the other two candidates, fortunately, were both non-locals who didn't know the area well. So I just happened to slip in at a time when there wasn't very much opposition, and there was, I think, sympathy for the idea of having a local resident on council.

EH Although you had stood as a Labor Party candidate. I guess the Liberal Party candidates stand as Liberals - although do people just know?

ALEXANDER Well, the people I was opposed to were both business types but they didn't announce their political allegiance either, so it was in Perth at the time - although I think it was different in Fremantle then where they had a Labor ticket going - even the early eighties, I think - in Perth it was regarded - because of the Burke influence - not the thing to do on the Labor side, and the business people - I think they also subscribed to this myth that local government was non-political, even though they were very clearly conservative and supporting a conservative agenda. They would say things when this subject came up for discussion, "Oh we leave our political allegiance at the door when we come into Council House" - and I asked, “Well how do you do that?" I could never work out how they did it.

EH It was an idea of keeping politics out of council.

ALEXANDER Yes, it was weird – The PCC was a very political place, of course; probably always had been. Certainly according to Tom Stannage's History of Perth - council of the 1980s wasn't that much different to the council of the 1880s.

EH That raises the question of whether the local councils were controlled by the sort of born-to-rule group; whether they were naturally conservative places or had there always been a Labor -

ALEXANDER I don't think so Erica. I think in Perth's case there may have been one or two radicals from time to time, but they were in the minority, and even the councillors coming from working class areas like Vic Park, tended to be local business people - the local pharmacists or the local newspaper proprietor, that sort of thing - and in nine cases out of ten they were pretty conservative. There were a few exceptions - I think that had probably happened in the past as well, but certainly the dominant power group from my reading of Perth city history was always from the business end of town and/or the establishment.

TAPE ONE SIDE B ALEXANDER 18

EH When you arrived on council, how did the power groups divide? Did you have some allegiances to form or were you isolated?

ALEXANDER I wanted to, but I found fairly quickly that I was not completely isolated but there were 27 councillors at the time - it was a very unwieldy body. There were nine wards stretching from Vic Park through to City Beach, each with three councillors. Typically, if I put up opposition to proposals that were before the council say, for a big new redevelopment in the city, the usual if there was a division - not always, but quite often - it would go something like 24:3 against, and I was one of the three. There was Keith Hayes from Vic Park who was a lovely guy - haven't seen him for a long time; blind, but with a very strong social conscience, and so he was a bit of a kindred spirit. There was also a conservative councillor, Bertha Beecroft from City Beach, but she was quite a character and she liked to see the council power group being opposed, even if she might agree with the power group's views she liked to see them getting a bit of a hard time; and Joan Watters was another, similarly, who often would come up to me; she was a business person through and through and conservative on most issues, but would say to me, "You and I are kindred spirits, Ian, because I attack them from this direction and you attack them from that direction" - meaning she came from the right and I came from the left. So between us she reckoned we'd catch them in the pincer movement somehow.

EH Did you ever catch -

ALEXANDER No, no - well, one time, I think the one time we did - and I actually can't remember which way Joan fell on this particular issue - was when they sacked the Perth City Council outside work force, who went on strike, and - this was in eighty-three, I think; mainly the garbos but also the garden staff - and they had a big strike. They sacked them and employed non-union labour - very much similar to the recent troubles on the waterfront. I went down to the depot most mornings to see what was happening; I was quite horrified at the way the police kept back the workers and allowed the non-union work force through - quite a lot of violence at the gates of the council depot, which is now trendy housing. In the end, when that issue went back to council, somehow the small group of us managed to persuade the council to reinstate the work force - I think the Industrial Commission probably had something to do with it as well. But that was the only occasion, I think - barring a couple of other interesting instances - where the power group was defeated.

EH The key issues, were they planning, heritage - what were they?

ALEXANDER Well for me they were, because that was sort of my area of interest anyway - planning and heritage issues, and also social welfare. I saw a connection between the two because the way it seemed to be happening was the council was spending most of its time and TAPE ONE SIDE B ALEXANDER 19 budget on the city block, and it was very keen on encouraging big developments - eg the Palace Hotel - and the Bond tower above the Palace Hotel, as it subsequently became; they didn't really care much about the hotel, except as a token of past heritage - but they were most concerned to get a fifty storey building to brighten up the city skyline; they were really very much into the development ethos.

END OF TAPE ONE SIDE B TAPE TWO SIDE A ALEXANDER 20

ALEXANDER Yes, so there was a lot of time and attention at most council meetings devoted to the planning agenda. I couldn't get on the planning committee.

EH Why not? Was that a concerted effort to keep you off?

ALEXANDER Yes, well, I think so. They told me at the time . . . The other person who was there, of course, was Paul Ritter, who had been sacked as the city planner.

EH I wanted to ask you, was he still the planner, no?

ALEXANDER No, he'd been sacked as the planner by that time, but he'd got himself re-elected as a local councillor because he was quite popular in the community and people sympathised with his plight. He was a very interesting person to listen to, and so he was always a thorn in the council side on planning issues. But he couldn't get onto the planning committee either; and there was an architect on the council at the time, and neither could he get on to the planning committee. So, it happened that the two planners and the one architect who thought, maybe we had something to contribute to the planning committee, couldn't get on the main decision making body; and it was very difficult to overturn a planning committee decision once it came to full council - although we tried from time to time. The other factor that was happening was, it seemed to me - and we'd picked this up through a bit of informal and then more formal research - was that vested interest was playing a big part in council decision making; and it turned out that several of the key councillors on the planning committee also had interests - of one sort or another - in city development. They were either contractors to developers, consultants to developers, or developers themselves.

EH So they weren't declaring interests.

ALEXANDER They were declaring interests -

EH And still participating.

ALEXANDER - but . . . Well, even where they didn't participate in the vote - they were allowed to debate but they were supposed to go out of the room when the vote was taken. They had this sort of log rolling system, which I've read about subsequently, which again comes from the States - all good things do don't they - you know, "You vote for mine and I'll vote for yours."

EH You said that with irony I suspect. Better make sure that's recorded.

ALEXANDER I started to take a bit of an interest in that, because it seemed to me - and a lot of my contemporaries - a very unfair process, and I started to draw attention to what I thought was going on. That made TAPE TWO SIDE A ALEXANDER 21 me very unpopular with my fellow councillors; you just were not supposed to draw attention to that sort of thing. At first they said I was completely wrong, then they said I'd made it up, and then when it was clear I hadn't made it up, they just said I'd put the wrong interpretation on it, and they were all honest and above board.

EH Is this an old boys' club, as well?

ALEXANDER It seemed to be - you see because they did declare their interests. They never spoke in favour of a development that they had an interest in; they were discreet enough usually to avoid doing that, but you knew that there was a sort of cabal that sort of met as an old boys' club, if you like, and seemed to support one another's development projects ; and even if that wasn't their primary interest on council, it was certainly having a big influence on council decision making. So we tried to expose and fight that, but it was a long, and in the end, not a particularly successful fight - which I took into Parliament later on. It seemed that there was a lot of council attention and time being spent on building big office blocks in the city and not really caring about the impact they had either on the city's heritage, or on a social structure, or on sucking resources into the city and away from the residential areas, which were - particularly in Highgate's case and Vic Park - really starved of council services.

EH Was there beginning to be an awareness of questions of urban renewal and things like City Vision?

ALEXANDER Yes, a little bit. City Vision got going in the late eighties; and there was certainly some criticism, not just from me and a few other dissidents, but from many others in the community at the time - I guess I was just reflecting community criticism really of the council's priorities; a lot of people thought they'd got their priorities wrong, not just on the question of vested interest, but simply in terms of supporting commercial development at the expense of everything else - and a lot of people in the planning profession, in particular, that I was in contact with at the time, shared that opinion. I guess it was only a matter of time before there was a formal reaction against it and the council did eventually change its policies - or modified them slightly.

EH What do you think were the great losses in that period?

ALEXANDER One that comes to mind is the loss of the old Boans building on Wellington Street, built in the late 1890s and now replaced by Myers, because again . . . The council in this case were in league with the State and Federal Governments - it was sort of three levels of Government wanted to redevelop Forrest Place and in the process they got rid of the Padbury buildings and Boans. I remember at the time when we moved on council - probably Keith Hayes would've seconded this motion - to only give the Myers complex permission to go ahead with plot TAPE TWO SIDE A ALEXANDER 22 ratio bonuses, which they always gave developments which they wanted to encourage - extra height and bulk - if they retained, at least, the facades of the old Boans building on Wellington and Murray Streets; and somehow early in the meeting we managed to get this amendment through - absolutely delighted and amazed - but by the end of the meeting they'd got hold of a few extra councillors who weren't there at the time of the vote, and some how they managed to recommit that question and it went the other way. So a short-lived victory was very short-lived. Subsequently, I remember at supper - the council had ridiculously lavish suppers after the meetings and that was another bone of contention, the entertainment budget - one of the councillors who was a notorious character, who had definite real estate interests, said to me - he was a very rough diamond so he'd always speak to you in a sort of a mock friendly manner - "Well Ian" he said, "you didn't win that one in the end, did you?" - because he'd outsmarted us and got it recommitted towards the end of the meeting - and I sort of said, "Oh, well", I said, "look if we don't succeed in doing it through the council, what I'll do," - sort of tongue in cheek - "is get Jack Munday over here" - he was putting green bans on buildings and developments in Sydney where the community opposed them. I said "We'll get him over here and slap a green ban on the development", and he looked at me and said, "Son", he said, "if you do that" - and so everybody in the room could hear - "you'll just end up in the Swan River with concrete boots on. Ha, ha, ha." But his laugh was such you knew there was some sort of serious intent - it used to scare me. So that was the sort of basis they operated on; not only could you not achieve reasonable planning objectives, like retaining historic buildings - or at least the facades of them - but also they became very brutish in their behaviour if you threatened to do so. That was a learning experience for me.

EH This raises so many questions. Perhaps the first one - temperamentally, were you suited? Did you have ways -

ALEXANDER Probably not. I wasn't anticipating that sort of thing at all; I knew it would be rough, but I didn't think it would be quite that rough. Same thing happened later in State politics. Yes, it certainly influenced my decision not to stand again for council after one term, which I wanted to do in one sense, but in another I'd remarried by that time and my wife at the time wanted to move to a different suburb and she said, "I want to get out of this altogether. Let's go in a different direction." So that seemed like a reasonable argument at the time; and although I was quite enjoying council and the local branch certainly wanted me to nominate again, I was finding it very stressful, and for that sort of reason partly, and also it was very, very time consuming.

EH There is a couple of follow-up questions: One of them is time. If there's a cabal operating - it assumes that these are all people who have got time to spend and a shared interest in spending that time.

TAPE TWO SIDE A ALEXANDER 23

ALEXANDER Yes; a lot of them were either retired, or semi-retired, or their businesses didn't seem to require their presence very often, whereas my business at WAIT as a lecturer did. In fact I remember my boss saying to me - probably quite reasonably - "Look Ian, are you a full- time lecturer or a full-time councillor?", and I said, "Well, I'm actually trying to be both." He said, "Well, you're going to have to cut one." So I wound my council activity back a bit anyway, probably in eighty-four, and then sort of thought, well okay maybe now it's time to concentrate on different priorities for a while, and that's [another reason] why I didn't stand again.

EH The other question is one of a lobby group forming - in this case for the residents' point of view, whether it's Labor or a local activist group - did that start to happen as a result of your being there?

ALEXANDER I don't think it was a result of my being there, it was coincidental that it did. Issues like the freeway, for example - which is now, unfortunately, being built through Northbridge finally - at the time, like a lot of other local residents in that area, I was very opposed to it; in fact my first interest in that issue started when I was a student studying the land use patterns in the city centre, twenty years previously - almost.

EH Was it on the Stephenson plan?

ALEXANDER An early version was. Stephenson wanted to take the northern bypass along Roe Street and the railway. But then the metropolitan region plan, which was based on the Stephenson plan, gazetted in 1963; they'd had American consultants out by that time; it turned the northern bypass - Stephenson had it as a relatively [minor road] like a four lane road with roundabouts. The consultants changed it to a full scale freeway. So they said "It's got to go further north" - because the geometrics of the city ring required them to put it further north and they had a full freeway ring around the city planned at that stage, in the 1963 scheme. Paul Ritter, amongst others, attacked that very strongly, and they've subsequently downgraded the ring along the river - so they weren't going to put a freeway along Riverside Drive, but they retained the northern leg, believing that that was essential to the distribution of traffic. But I could see - and a lot of other people could see - that it was blighting the area because they started acquiring land and so it was slowly pushing that part of Northbridge down; and it also, we thought - and still do - that it would bring huge extra amounts of traffic, even though it was supposed to be a bypass road, it was inevitably going to attract more traffic to the city and cause more congestion, pollution, etc. So an activist group formed around that issue, for example; and I think an activist group formed around the issue of getting more community facilities in and around, which subsequently resulted in a big community centre at Leederville - which served both Highgate and Leederville. I think, maybe drawing attention to those issues and having a public platform as a councillor, gave you privileged access to the Press. It might have helped those groups along the way a bit, but basically, I think it was TAPE TWO SIDE A ALEXANDER 24 a time when the community was becoming more politically active anyway and demanding better things.

EH And did they go on to get councillors on to the council?

ALEXANDER Yes, in a few cases they did. David Berry, for example, who is, I think, still active in Cambridge Council, got on to council at Leederville at that time, and others, through those sorts of local issues; and they also lobbied their existing councillors very hard. But the City Council continued to support the bypass nonetheless, despite big community opposition - which was always a sore point.

EH Would you go as far as to say that was vested interests?

ALEXANDER Could be there as well - certainly in the East Perth end of the project there were vested interests around land development because it's obviously going to increase the value of property around the path in the long run and I think some of the canny investors could see that.

EH Were these power groups divided amongst themselves as well?

ALEXANDER It was hard to tell because I wasn't really given that much of an inside look, but I think they sort of - they were and they weren't. At one level they all looked after their own interests but somehow they recognised that they needed collective - well they did need the numbers to do that, and you know, that same councillor I told you about before - most of them would, you know, sort of, if you mentioned the possibility of them having a conflict of interest would deny it, but this councillor in particular - I don't think I want to mention his name; people might recognise him anyway - he said, one day when I went in to attack the vested interests - they said, "Well come and explain to us"at a council committee meeting "your views", which I did; and I happened to be sitting next to this rough diamond councillor, and when I'd been through my three or four little cases where I thought the vested interest factor was very clear - they subsequently demolished it with their own arguments, or tried to - he said to me, "Oh well, thank God for that, Ian. For a moment there I thought you were going to attack some of my developments." So he was quite brazen about it; he didn't care really. I never did [pursue that line] because I thought after that incident he was just too dangerous to pursue.

EH Just another couple of questions on the council, Ian: Was there a division between people perhaps like yourself who were educated and informed - or someone like Paul Ritter - it's a hard division to define. Did education come into it, do you think?

TAPE TWO SIDE A ALEXANDER 25

ALEXANDER It might have done. There was probably a little bit of resentment among some of the councillors - the architect sort of planning lobby, if you like, and the social welfare lobby who happened to be people with an education, yes. I think there was a bit of resentment at us sort of coming in and trying to influence their decision making; and occasionally you would get jibes about that.

EH So they were the people with experiences.

ALEXANDER Yes. They'd be "university of hard knocks" - none of this academic nonsense; they knew how things really worked. Yes, we were just sort of naive idealists who should have known better.

EH That's an argument that's very difficult?

ALEXANDER It is, really; because while I'd had a bit of experience, I clearly hadn't had as much experience - and wasn't as old for a start - as these guys. Well they had a completely different agenda really; they didn't see it, for example, when we attacked the social welfare budget - as we continued to do while I was there because it hardly existed at all. They'd say things like, "It's not a council responsibility to get involved in social welfare. That's a State Government job or a Federal Government job, not ours." So they would recognise the need for it but they would say council has no role; whereas other councils at Stirling, say, and Fremantle at the time, had a very big social welfare operation going - it was very important to local people, I think.

EH What about the cultural events for Perth, how did they see that?

ALEXANDER That was a bit different because they saw the city getting prestige from, say, involvement in the Festival of Perth, or running the Concert Hall, or other Perth Theatre Trust locations, so I think they saw there that the council got some kudos for it, and the arts community was clever enough to lobby at that level, I think; whereas there was no kudos in being involved in social welfare - because that was sort of for the down and outs who [on their view] “shouldn't be in the city” anyway.

EH This will also relate to your parliamentary experience - just coming to terms with the standing orders and how the council operated, how difficult was that?

ALEXANDER Quite difficult at first, although their standing orders actually are, I think, in some ways freer than those of the Parliament. They don't have quite so many and once you'd learnt the system you could actually have a say on many more items than you could in the parliamentary situation as a backbencher. So the fact that I was not part of a group myself, was a disadvantage in once sense - didn't have any numbers - but it gave me a free scope to speak on anything I wanted to; and there was no restriction on the number of times you could speak, TAPE TWO SIDE A ALEXANDER 26 other than other people's patience; and in the end you knew you were not going to influence a decision very much anyway - you gave up after a while. That wasn't a real problem; it was relatively open in that sense - not in many others.

EH Did your experience on the council influence your decision to actually enter State politics?

ALEXANDER Yes, it did, because I was still interested in the same issues and I thought, also, that if I was in politics full time was opposed to half time, or part time, then I could do the job properly; whereas I wouldn't then have this conflict with my full time job that I had when I was lecturing at WAIT. So I figured that full time politics would free up the rest of the time and really enable me to get properly involved and maybe have more influence. It didn't work that way, but that's what I thought at the time. But yes, the council experience definitely pushed me in that direction; and a lot of the people said, "Oh you're just on the council as a stepping stone to State politics", but at the time I didn't think that was the case; I thought probably not, but maybe. It certainly wasn't an ambition in my mind at the time I was on the council, although I knew that many people did go from local to State politics; and often people in the Labor Party would ask me - especially once I started to get a bit of prominence on the council - "Oh, are you heading for State politics?", and so gradually I would start to think, "Well, maybe I am."

EH And the experience that you gained - could you justify perhaps that question of hard knocks. You'd had a few hard knocks in council after three years.

ALEXANDER I suppose so, I suppose so. But actually -

EH Did that experience pay off?

ALEXANDER Well, to some extent. I mean there was also - the other thing that was happening with the council was that there were links - I wasn't fully aware of at the time - between some of the councillors and the WA Inc players, because it happened that some of the prominent councillors were members of the Curtin Foundation, which of course funded the party in the early eighties and subsequently led to all of the WA Inc troubles, and those same people, of course, that were donating to the Curtin Foundation, happened to be at the front of all the Government contract lists - some of which went to council-related people and others didn't - I mean people who were on the council. We started to draw attention to that in the local branches and through the Perth electorate council, which was a collection of local branches in the Federal electorate of Perth - how the Labor Party organises it branches, or did then - and we tried to get these issues raised at the State Executive of the party where we had some minimal representation, but whenever we did we got a very strong anti reaction from the party hierarchy who would come out to the branches and say things like, "Don't you dare" - or not quite in these TAPE TWO SIDE A ALEXANDER 27 terms - but it felt like "don't you dare move these motions criticising the Government giving the contract to so-and-so. It's not because they're a friend of Government it's because they just happen to be a good contractor. You should know better." So they were very keen to suppress any dissent in the party - it was quite widespread at the time - on those grounds. I remember the party secretary of the day coming up to me - actually at a private function - and saying - because I'd criticised this same rough diamond councillor again because he had interests in property development at East Perth and we were keen not to see the freeway go ahead that I mentioned before. We moved a motion at the State Executive of the Labor Party against the Burswood bridge and in my speech against that decision - the Government had already made the decision to build the bridge, but subsequently backed off when they saw the extent of community opposition - I'd mentioned the vested interest factor on the council as one reason for not going ahead with it. As I say, I wasn't fully aware that this same councillor was a member of the Curtin Foundation at the time, but I became that when the party secretary came up and said, "Don't you dare criticise that councillor. He's a very close friend of the Labor Party", and I said, "Precisely, that's what I'm objecting to - that he's both a friend and has vested interests in development." He said, "You say that sort of thing in public and you'll be expelled." I mean, this was at a private party, I couldn't believe it. I didn't take it seriously, but that was the extent which they would try and intimidate you, if you stepped on their toes.

EH Ian, who was the secretary at the time?

ALEXANDER It was Michael Beahan, subsequently a senator. I guess he was doing Burke's bidding because I'm sure - well he may have thought it up himself. He also was secretary to the Curtin Foundation. So they were very sensitive about any criticism of the Curtin Foundation set up.

EH There wouldn't have been alarm bells, as such, I guess at that stage, but did things start to –

ALEXANDER Yes, very much questioned the strategy of that sort of insider trading, as we saw it; particularly when, say, Dallas Dempster got the contract for the Casino - he again was a member of the Curtin Foundation. The electrical contract went to the Lord Mayor of the day, who was a member of the foundation, and the building contract went to Multiplex, and the boss of Multiplex, Roberts, was also in this; I mean they were all in there - all apparently gaining from their special relationship with the Government, which of course was denied strenuously until the royal commission, really. So yes, alarm bells did start to ring amongst a lot of people in the party, and I guess in the community as well - because some of the Press were starting to pick it up. The weekend paper at the time - what was it called - it didn't last - The Western Mail was running stories along those lines, getting sued every inch of the way, I think; that's how they silenced their opposition - through the courts. Yes, so, part of my TAPE TWO SIDE A ALEXANDER 28 mission in standing for Parliament was to try and expose that sort of thing within the party; I didn't necessarily want to embarrass the party publicly, but did want to raise the issue within the parliamentary party. They would say to me things like, when we'd raise these issues at branch meetings, "You've got to put up or shut up"; in other words, get some more evidence then we might listen to you; it was hard to get, and when you did come up with it, they'd deny it. When I subsequently got preselection I remember saying to the party secretary of the day - it was Stephen Smith by then - "Well now you told me to put up or shut up." I said, "I've put up and I'm certainly not going to shut up."

EH And what was his response?

ALEXANDER He said, "Oh well, just take it easy, will you?"

EH Not sympathetic -

ALEXANDER Not really, but they were stuck with me as a candidate by that time, so they had to sort of handle me with kid gloves, I think at that point.

EH We'll get to that point of selection in a minute. Who were the other people that supported you in questioning what was happening?

ALEXANDER There was Alannah MacTiernan, founder of the Highgate branch, and now a member of Parliament herself. She was very keen on the issue being pursued; in fact, she first put me on to it really. Before I was even on council she'd been doing a bit of her own research, because she happened to be running a local newspaper in Mt Lawley and stumbled across what was going on, by chance. So she was keen to pursue it and encouraged me as much as possible, and in the early times - she sold the paper subsequently - would also publicise the issues through the local paper and draw people's attention to it that way. And John McGuire who is still a lecturer out at Curtin, and he was also keen to see the issue pursued; and Frank Donovan. There were three or four of us who pursued the issue quite vigorously whenever we could at branch and State Executive level of the party.

EH That's not very many - four people.

ALEXANDER No, you're right.

EH Given the level of donations to the Labor Party and the contracts that were being let.

ALEXANDER Well, we got quite strong support at branch level - I guess we were just the prime movers - and there were probably, in fact I know there were others in other branches - particularly down Fremantle way and at Vic Park, and through the left of the party, which subsequently TAPE TWO SIDE A ALEXANDER 29 formed a faction, we managed to pursue the issue minimally, but we found fairly quickly that the party hierarchy - whichever faction - was not really interested in that particular sort of questioning.

EH After you left the council in 1985, did you get more and more involved in this?

ALEXANDER Yes, I did. I actually did some research, and wrote a paper, which I presented at a conference - an academic conference - in the mid-eighties on planning and corruption in Perth and the Perth City Council. It didn't get much attention at the time, because it was an academic paper, and framed in rather academic terms, but that was the paper I subsequently used when I went into Parliament - the basis of my further sort of attack on the issue. We did get strong support in the branches sometimes, and occasionally we'd get a motion critical of Government, through an electorate council meeting, for example; that was when they started to get worried and came down and put pressure either on individuals like me, or on party members in general, and said, "Look these people are just stirring for their own sake; they're a destabilising influence"; and so some people who might be sympathetic to the issue would think, "Oh, it's not worth pursuing" at that point. It got the same reaction when we raised it in the Caucus room; people were scared of it. It was a big issue; probably I didn't realise how big when I stumbled into it. I was a bit naive in thinking that you could expose the issue and therefore it would somehow change things around. Ultimately it did; not because we exposed it because other people did, but I don't think any of us realised at the time what it would ultimately lead to.

EH Were you able to get yourself elected as a delegate to State or national conferences?

ALEXANDER Yes; through the faction, because everything was done on a factional basis by the mid-eighties in the party, so you had to be active in order to get a voice at a conference or at the State Executive even. I became a member of the State Executive in probably eighty-five - something like that - as a branch or electorate council representative, through the left wing faction; and you could raise issues like that there. The opportunities for debate were there, but they were restricted because you had a very full agenda and the power hierarchy would try to ensure that the dissident items were given minimal time - they didn't always succeed - and I also found that once I was part of a group like that there were other issues I wanted to pursue as well; eg environmental issues, which the party was - well the Government was starting to ignore - the forests in particular. There was a lot of discontent in the party at the way in which the Burke Government set up CALM and all its disastrous policies that followed; and even though they made a few concessions by declaring a national park here and there, there was still a lot of clear- felling going on, and so on. So there were lots of environmental issues that the Government's development ethos brought to bear on the party - TAPE TWO SIDE A ALEXANDER 30 sort of stirred up discontent in the party - and I became involved in those almost as much as the original things that attracted my attention.

END OF TAPE TWO SIDE A TAPE TWO SIDE B ALEXANDER 31

EH Other issues - the environment.

ALEXANDER Yes, environment was one and that was linked to planning, in a sense - linked to the issues of traffic and public transport - or the lack thereof, although Labor did quite well in that way in putting the electric train in, in the city. Yes there were a lot of - there were forests issues, issues relating to mining, say in national parks - the Government was proposing to allow mining under certain conditions in national parks which caused a lot of angst in the party. There were issues over particular mining developments, such as rare earth plants in the south west, bauxite mining in the Darling Ranges, mineral sands mining on the south coast, and so on; a whole range of issues that once you started getting involved, you seemed to get sucked more and more into, and I thought it was good that started to - I was keen to take up issues other than the ones I was traditionally, sort of, by that time, associated with.

EH Were you actually able to work on policy and influence through the party, or was it because the Labor Party was in Government it was more difficult?

ALEXANDER It was more difficult but there were lots of people there keen to keep the policy sound, even if the Government didn't implement the policy - or went against the policy. At conferences usually the left didn't quite have the numbers, but when you put it together with the centre left faction, on environmental issues the centre would usually vote with the left, whereas they didn't on a lot of others; and so you could at least get a compromise through to keep the platform relatively sound, as we saw it. There were lots of people like Beth Schultz, who's still very active in the forest, she was active in the Labor Party at the time, and lots of other very strong, good people there who were very active on committees. I was involved in committees but because I was busy doing so many other things I never got into it as much as other activists did. I went to a national conference, subsequently - by that time I was in Parliament. So you sort of gradually were able to get to what you thought were the decision making centres; but of course, having got on to the State Executive and falsely thought that that was the decision making body of the party - the supreme decision making body - you actually found there was a little thing called the administrative committee which set the agenda for the State Executive, which filtered everything that was on the State Executive agenda, and made a recommendation one way or the other - or took it off the agenda altogether; and then there was a battle for positions on the administrative committee; and so it went on and on. Then of course you found that anyway at the time because, as you say, Labor was in Government, really in the decision making sense it was the Cabinet that actually had the power. I suppose that also encouraged me to think, "Well okay, perhaps I should be closer to where the Cabinet is." It was a never ending process of trying to get closer to the centre of power in order to influence the decision making process.

TAPE TWO SIDE B ALEXANDER 32

EH And all the time building alliances through the left - is this what you were doing?

ALEXANDER Yes, that's true, I suppose. At one point John McGuire and I thought that it would be a good idea for one of us to stand for convenorship of the left, which wasn't a particularly prominent position but obviously, from a political point of view, was an important position, as convenor of the left wing faction. Neither of us stood in the end; we may not have got it anyway, but the opportunity was there and we thought about what the implications of that might be in a strategic sense if - by that time I was actively thinking of seeking a seat in Parliament - this might have been eighty-five, eighty-six I guess by then.

EH This process of working out where power lay, how difficult was it?

ALEXANDER Very difficult, Erica. I remember subsequently Yvonne Henderson, who finally got herself elected to Cabinet against Brian Burke's wishes, in the late eighties - I think by that time Burke had moved on and Peter Dowding was the Premier - and she said, "Well Ian I thought once I was in Cabinet I would there at last be near the source of power and we could actually get some of these important issues to the left, discussed in Cabinet", and she said, "What I found was that there was no decision making in Cabinet at all really"; she said, "All the decisions seemed to be made before or after the meetings somehow", and she reckoned the real decisions were actually made in the men's loo, in breaks during Cabinet meetings!

EH We are talking about this elusive nature of power; the closer that you came to the centre, almost the further away you were.

ALEXANDER Yes, it's very elusive. One incident on the council actually taught me that there was another way to access power - not that I ever really got into it, I don't think I'm a deal maker at heart - but one of the few deals I did actually, revolved around this PCC social welfare budget. We formulated a plan - John McGuire and Alannah and I, and a few others in the Highgate branch, to double the welfare budget and halve the entertainment budget, because at the time they were spending much more on entertaining themselves and their cronies than they were on social welfare. So each year - I was on the finance committee, couldn't make the town planning committee, but they thought, "Oh he can't do any harm in finance; he'll be well outnumbered there, we'll put him on the finance committee" - and I actually got quite an interest in the end - because I thought well, there may be some positive things you can do here, like influencing the budget - so each year I would move this motion to double the welfare budget and halve the entertainment budget - it was just regarded as a joke at the finance committee - but the third year came around and I was sitting there at the table, so I said, not very convinced, "Mr Chairman, I'd like to move my usual motion that we da, da, da, da, and he said, "Oh, that's a good idea", and I looked at him - because he TAPE TWO SIDE B ALEXANDER 33 was one of the most conservative brutish councillors there was, he and I never saw eye to eye on anything - and he said, "Yes, that's a good idea. Let's put it on the list of priority considerations." I couldn't believe it. A few other councillors muttered about it. He said, "No, we'll just put it on the list of possible options" - so that kept them quiet - and after the meeting he said to me, "I'd like a word with you Ian", and I said, "I thought you would. I'd like a word with you as well", and he said to me, "Ian, you live next door to a Mrs Fitzsimmons in Highgate, don't you?", and I said, "That's right. How do you know that?", and he said, "Oh she's good friends with my mother. But isn't it the case of Mrs Fitzsimmons has asked you to lop a tree in your front yard which goes close to her electricity line?", and I said, "Oh yes, that's right." I said, "Jim, that's right. I haven't got around to it, because we're not convinced that it's a real problem; we don't like chopping trees etc." He said, "Well, look my mum" - and this is this guy, in his fifties, big brutish fellow, you know - sort of almost a champion boxer by looks - "My mum is giving me hell" he said, "about this, and if you don't get Mrs Fitzsimmons - Can't you just sort of see your way clear to getting that branch cut?", and I said, "Jim, and can't you see your way clear to keeping this doubling the welfare budget on the agenda?"; he said, "That's the idea Ian." Believe it or not he almost delivered that; I mean it didn't quite double, but there was a very substantial increase in the welfare budget. He steered it through the council as if he believed in it perfectly. He gave this amazing speech - where he used some of my speech notes - to justify the increase from the council. He said it was time the council got interested in social welfare, and the downtrodden, and the poor; and we'll soon become a leading council, and blah, blah. Other councillors questioned it and he said, "No, no, this is all in order. It's not a huge increase even though it looks like it", and somehow he steered it through the council despite questioning, all on the basis of this branch of a tree. It offended my green principles to have to cut the branch of the tree, but, well, you know!

EH So how much of council, and then Government, operated on this basis?

ALEXANDER Well I guess quite a lot. That was the only incident I found on the council - because I was almost finished my council term by time - but I guess if one had become more part of the system, you could have done it on that basis - and certainly in Government. Within the Labor Party there was an awful lot of trade-off on that basis between the factions - you know, it's back to the log rolling - you vote for me on this one and I'll vote for you on that one, even though neither of us particularly believe in the other's thing. That was how the factions dealt with each other - by compromising deals: You have this position and we'll have that one - sort of sharing of the spoils of power. Ironically, while I was doing that deal, we were also fighting similar deals in the Labor Party over policy matters and you can't trade-off environment policy for social welfare etc.

TAPE TWO SIDE B ALEXANDER 34

EH This system of making decisions, how frustrating was it?

ALEXANDER Very, really, because you sort of felt like you were locked into a whole system that depended on who was scratching whose back as to what actually got on to the books as policy - let alone implement it. Also who got into Parliament. There was a system of power sharing, if you like, between the factions, and at the time I stood for preselection the party had made a decision - no the party hadn't; the faction, the left faction - not to contest that seat, because it was going, by agreement, to the right wing faction. Terry Burke was of the right so it was "Oh you can keep that seat, but we'll have someone over there in another seat”. But the party didn't accept that - or at least the faction didn't accept that decision of the hierarchy and overturned it. You had to fight against that deal making all the way if you wanted to advance either policy interests or your own interests really. Unless you were prepared to do deals you didn't easily get anywhere, in policy terms.

EH Was it vindictive?

ALEXANDER Sometimes, yes; sometimes very vindictive. In fact, at the State Executive of the Labor Party where we moved that motion on the Burswood bridge, I mentioned earlier, I was really viciously attacked by a Minister at the time, David Parker, in very personal terms - like in a public forum. It didn't get reported so it was really no skin off my back, but it was - well actually it hurt quite a lot - because he accused me of being dishonest, you know, and I just thought it was completely unwarranted. Yes, so they did get vicious if they had to. I was unknown at the State Executive at the time, and I was just painted as a dishonest, self- interested councillor. It was quite ironic really with what I was fighting against.

EH How distracted was the Burke Government by this stage, because we're leading on to the time when Terry Burke was going to resign. Were they becoming distracted and obsessed by the mounting WA Inc deals, saga and controversy?

ALEXANDER I think so, yes, because once I did manage to - or we did, our ginger group - convince the left wing faction that these seats - there was Perth and Morley; Arthur Tonkin resigned at the same time as Terry Burke, more or less - we convinced the left that the left should stand candidates for preselection within the Party which we subsequently did; and both Frank Donovan and I won preselection, by narrow margins - Frank, I think won by three votes and I managed to get a few more by chance - just by very vigorous lobbying of State Executive delegates and knowing nearer the time of the vote that Brian Burke, who normally was on the phone to delegates if he thought the vote was going to go against him and would say, you know, "You've got to vote for my candidate and don't forget" - and no doubt there were deals hanging on the result of that arrangement as well - he was hardly on the phone at all; whereas we TAPE TWO SIDE B ALEXANDER 35 were on the phone all the time to everybody - they got quite sick of us by the time we ended the campaign. We'd rung most three or four times to see if we could convince them to vote for us. So that was one reason we were able to win because we did much more lobbying than the Burke faction did, and I think they underestimated our determination and thought, "Oh well, it's only a couple of mad lefties, they'll never get the majority of support at the State Executive", But they misjudged the mood because a lot of State Executive delegates we spoke to - even if they weren't in the left faction - said "Yes we'll support you because we're sick of deals being done and particular people being selected for Parliament ahead of grassroots candidates", and they saw us in that category. We got a bit of a sympathy vote because there was a prevailing mood in the party that was worried about the Government and the WA Inc things on the one hand, and also particularly critical of the Government's continuing to override the party on a number of major decisions and platform items which were just being either ignored or gone against completely. So there was a lot of discontent in the ranks over a wide variety of issues, and we sort of, I suppose, were lucky enough to ride that wave in and get preselected against the Government's own nominees.

EH Within that Perth electoral district - I mean it's a Federal seat as well as a State seat -

ALEXANDER The State seat's much smaller.

EH Did you have support - Joe Berinson would have been on the council for that, what kind of support did you have?

ALEXANDER Joe wasn't actually on the State Executive so he wasn't voting, I think. We had a bit of support amongst existing left wing politicians in the Caucus - people like Fred McKenzie, who was from the Vic Park area and I met through sort of branch activities and Frank knew as well; Jim Brown, an old stalwart from the left; and three or four others - even Jim McGinty eventually worked for us against his better judgment. He was convenor of the left at the time so he was forced to work for us even though he didn't want to at first. Influential figures - some more than others - were also working on our behalf - not so much in the political establishment but some union figures, and they controlled - each union had a certain number of votes at the time - I think it's different now.

EH Were people starting to see that there may be some real basis to the WA Inc problems and that there may be advantages for them in pursuing it?

ALEXANDER Not really. In my preselection letter I remember drawing attention to some of the city planning issues I'd been involved with, and the garbos dispute and that sort of thing, and I hinted at sort of corruption in high places, but didn't actually say much; and it wasn't really an issue either openly for me or others, except in a very general sense - because people knew I had taken up - or Frank and I - these issues we've TAPE TWO SIDE B ALEXANDER 36 talked about before of favouritism to Curtin Foundation members and so on. They were aware of our campaigning in that direction, and we stressed that as much as we thought was feasible without wanting to draw too many, or too much attention to that part of our platform, if you like.

EH Did people have any idea of the amount of money that was donated to the Curtin Foundation? Was that widely known?

ALEXANDER It wasn't known; it certainly wasn't widely circulated in the party. It was available to particular members of the inner circle - the administrative committee, I think controlled or somehow sat on the Curtin Foundation committee - but that information was privileged - you weren't supposed to pass it on. You might hear a bit on the gravepine, but we certainly weren't aware of the extent of the donations at that stage - although we could see there were apparent linkages were weren't really sure of the extent of them - and we really weren't aware of what was going on, say, with Rothwells and the Connell disasters and so on. Even when I got into the Caucus we didn't know the full facts at all; you just had to take it on trust that what you were being told was somewhere near the truth - probably usually it wasn't.

END OF TAPE TWO SIDE B TAPE THREE SIDE A ALEXANDER 37

EH A further interview with Ian Alexander, recorded on 21st August 1998.

EH To start today's session, Ian, could we introduce the 1987 election campaign. You had already spoken of it in our last interview where you were preselected probably because of the distraction of the Burke Government and the faction. What was the nature of the campaign?

ALEXANDER The preselection campaign do you mean?

EH No, the actual election campaign.

ALEXANDER Well, Perth was a safe seat at that time. They subsequently changed the boundaries, which is another interesting little story in itself. I mean, once I had got preselection it was pretty likely that I was going to win. But because we'd caught Burke by surprise.... I remember him being quite angry actually and surprised that we'd won, and he sort of left on the night of the preselection sort of white as a sheet, you know, not looking at anybody and you could just see for once the party had sort of succeeded in voting against him, even if it was only in a small way. Nonetheless, being Brian Burke, by the time the next day came on he'd summoned Frank Donovan and I in there and you could see he was still angry because when we got to his office very early in the morning he said "Got to be there by half-past-seven" or something, and then he kept us waiting for half an hour and summoned us in very gruffly and says, "Right, well you guys have won the preselection, now we've got to win the seats!" So he was on the one hand being very gruff, but on the other hand realising that we were representing his party so he had to give us a little bit more of the time of day than he would have wanted to.

So we sort of fitted into that atmosphere and my campaign was part of that. For the seat that I got the preselection for, Perth, the Burke candidate - Ken Withers was his name, he was a doctor, a pretty inoffensive sort of guy, you know, a nice guy, but he seemed to be definitely part of the Burke camp - they were so sure of winning that they'd actually had all these pamphlets printed up, which we found. So they had to destroy thousands of pamphlets - what a waste! - but it just showed you how cocky they were about their prospects of winning the preselection. So they had to start again, more or less. But they did that; they threw a lot of resources at my campaign, and Frank's as well. Despite the fact they were safe seats, they were very.... Because it was a by-election and the government was starting to how signs of trouble, they thought there might be problems winning it. But they gave us very strong support during the campaign, provided we behaved according to their norm - you know, I had to get a hair cut and wear a suit, which I regretted immediately afterwards but went along with initially. Burke said to me, "I used to be a ruffian like you but I learnt the hard way that you've got to look like them to succeed." So he was trying to be friendly but he was also being manipulative. TAPE THREE SIDE A ALEXANDER 38

Anyway he got me into the mould that he thought would be suitable to win the seat, projected the right image, you know, short hair cuts, suit.... you know, this guy's not as bad as he looks sort of thing, or he might have used to look, and actually spent time going around the traps with us during the campaign.

They provided us, for example, with access to people in the Vietnamese community who could speak the language, who were well known locally and who the Liberals had great trouble getting access to because they didn't have the same sorts of resources. The guy I was standing against, who turned out to be the father of a friend of mine, we were walking down the same street in Highgate doorknocking one day and it was just opposite the Vietnamese Buddhist temple. Well, because the Labor Party had the contacts we were sort of very well in with the Vietnamese Buddhist community who thought that they wanted better links with the government so they were keen to not exactly explicitly support but certainly implicitly support our campaign, and so we got a good reception there and all the cameras followed us around, you know, the start of a by- election which was in the news. And just down the street there was Mick Lekias, the Liberal candidate, sort of knocking on the door of houses opposite with no translator and having great difficulty getting through to people - people probably didn't know who he was or really what he represented - and us, on the other hand, we had this entourage, we had translators.... I mean, they overdid it really but we were much better resourced than the Opposition basically, so that reinforced, I think, any doubt in people's minds that Labor might not win the seat.

There was a very small swing against the party in the by-election; it was almost imperceptible, I think, in the end. So somehow the combination of projecting a candidate who was local, tidying up his image - I'm not sure whether that went for or against me in the end [laughs] - and sort of smoothing over any cracks that were apparent in the Labor Party's organisation and foundations (because the real story about WA Inc hadn't come out at that time), that sort of pushed the thing along and made sure I got elected by a pretty healthy majority.

EH Were you impressed by what the media would have referred to as the Brian Burke machine? Is this what it was?

ALEXANDER Yes, you're right, it was really. It had a bit of exposure through Terry Burke and the sort of stuff we talked about last time, but this was far more impressive. Yes, it was very well oiled. At the drop of a hat they were able to get the appropriate person with the right skills and the right sort of message to the media and you could see the sophistication of it and the strength of it. It was not just well organised, it was very well financed as well.

EH You spoke of yourself as a grassroots candidate, but you really were from the community and had represented the community on the city council. TAPE THREE SIDE A ALEXANDER 39

ALEXANDER Yes, that's true and I think that helped, and they exploited that during the campaign - the party that is - emphasised that part of my background on the council. Despite the controversy that it had caused, they sort of smoothed that over and said, "Ian's fighting for the community," or something like that. So they were able to incorporate the radical, if you like, and smooth up the rough image a bit so that it would appeal, they said, to those in the middle of the road and the swinging voters.

I think in a sort of a purely campaigning sense they did a very good job of adjusting quickly to a changed circumstance where they thought they had a particular candidate. And when they didn't they did their best to sort of remould me in the image of the other candidate and add other bits as well, which they thought would appeal to the more radical parts of the community, I suppose. So they did quite a good job at sort of bridging the gap.

EH Ian, I was going to ask you this later but it fits in now with what you've said. This question of image, you've spoken of tidying up your own image and the positives and negatives, this must have continued right through your parliamentary period. How important was it? Because for women parliamentarians it's become enormously important, but what was it like for a man and did you revert to your real self at some stage?

ALEXANDER Yes, I wanted to Erica, but for some reason when I was in Parliament, I never did. I think it's to do with this being part of the party structure. When I was on the city council, although I was supported by the party structure outside of the council and the local Highgate group, there was no sort of caucus, there was no formal mechanism of bringing you into line or anything like that, so you were free to do what you felt you wanted to do. So I was able to buck the system at Council House to a greater extent, or more easily, than I could in Parliament.

Burke had given us this little message, "You've got to tidy up," so that sort of sat with me on the one hand, and on the other hand I was sort of a bit resentful of having to do that. But I remember being interviewed by somebody in the press shortly after I got elected and all this controversy come up about the council - you know the stuff that I pursued there - and I said something like, "Well I'm trying to pursue the same ideals but from within the party and adopting a different image." So I was conscious of the fact that this was becoming a different.... I was trying to rationalise it, I suppose, by saying this was a different way of approaching things. If I had done it purely the way I would have preferred to I wouldn't have conformed to that extent, but I was convinced that maybe wearing a tie and a suit and cutting my hair really didn't matter that much because there were more important things to worry about, like the fundamental reforms that I was supposed to be pursuing rather than getting caught up in the controversy about whether I should or shouldn't wear a tie, which is interesting but not all that fundamental, I guess. TAPE THREE SIDE A ALEXANDER 40

I put that part of my rebellion on one side, if you like, and tried to pursue the same issues in a different way, but I always felt a little bit constricted and torn, in a sense, between wanting to be more myself - or what I thought of as myself - and wanting to get a fair hearing. So yes, that tension was there right the way through. I think I got sucked into the parliamentary way of doing things just a little bit too much. That really came home to me when I met a reporter somewhere out in Northbridge one night and I said hello and he said, "Oh Ian Alexander, I didn't recognise you. You're not wearing a suit!" I thought, my God, I must've really changed my image if I was seen as the man in the suit all of a sudden. So it was a bit of a worry to me that perhaps I had gone too much the other way.

EH Because this can have the effect of being a barrier to people as well - the image and the clothing as a barrier, rather than people being comfortable in their own identity.

ALEXANDER You mean to people wanting to make contact?

EH Ordinary people, yes.

ALEXANDER Yes. There again I think there's a sort of a two-way thing operating. When I was in my office I just dressed as normal - open neck shirt and what not, and always kept my hair relatively short in the early days - and as time went on I did start to change a bit. I always wore the suit to Parliament but I tried to wear a more casual suit, or a more avant-garde suit, something like that, to try and test the system just a little bit at the edges. In the electorate I took more and more just to wearing ordinary old clothes, partly so I could be more approachable by people, but other people would want me to have the formal image, you know, they sort of want their politicians to be.... while they want them to be accessible they also want them to look a bit like a politician. So if I didn't look like a politician, if I just wandered in in my jeans and T-shirt they thought "Well, who is this guy?"

EH It's a double bind isn't it?

ALEXANDER Exactly. Yes, there was that sort of questioning on both sides, but in the end I just sort of let it flow and hoped it wouldn't trouble me too much.

EH We'd better leave clothes - as interesting as they are - and talk now about your induction into Parliament. We'll talk about your.... I was going to say maiden speech, but inaugural speech....

ALEXANDER Yes, I deliberately called it that because of the obvious sexist overtones of the maiden speech.

EH What was the reaction when you said that?

TAPE THREE SIDE A ALEXANDER 41

ALEXANDER A lot of people said "Huh? What's this guy talking about?" You know, "It's always been maiden speeches." After all, this was still primarily a boys' or men's club at that stage, even though women were making themselves felt much more. Most people were just puzzled, they couldn't understand what I was on about really. They thought it was a very obscure point to be making.

EH We will discuss the club nature of everything as time goes on. What were your first impressions? Things like your reaction of the opening of Parliament and the formalities, the pressures of being there to start with?

ALEXANDER I think I was probably a bit overawed by it, actually, and I think maybe that goes back to my background with sort of formal schooling and all that sort of stuff. It reminded me of the ceremony of the church, actually, and the courts, which I suppose it's modelled on to some extent. Yes, very formal and rather intimidating in some ways. You've got the Speaker sitting up there in the chair, everybody has to pay obeisance to the Speaker, and it's much more formal than council ever was. Yes, I found that interesting but a little bit intimidating, I think, until I got used to the Standing Orders and how to approach things.

There was also, probably more importantly, the intimidating effect of having the Cabinet sitting there right in front of you, and you being on the back bench, so it was a very hierarchical system all the way through - the Parliament itself and then the party system within the Parliament. They made it very clear - the party chiefs, if not the ministers, the Whip, people like Bob Pearce in the early days when I was there - that you weren't to speak out of turn. If you had something to say you had to let them know first. You weren't to just pop up from your seat and say whatever came into your head; you had to check with the powers that be first. I found that really hard, actually, because I was used to in council being able to, even if I didn't succeed in being heard, at least saying my piece, but in Parliament your opportunities were fewer and the party hierarchy made it very clear that you had to speak at their behest, not at your own.

EH So this is a totally authoritarian model, isn't it.

ALEXANDER Yes, it was really. For a party with democratic ideals, the parliamentary party was much more hierarchical even than the Labor Party itself, and much more, as you say, authoritarian in a sense. They were very concerned that individuals shouldn't speak out of turn, or if they did, it was with some sort of agreement with the hierarchy.

EH Was there a rationale, Ian, or did you sense an underlying fear associated with this?

ALEXANDER Yes. I think it was a fear of loss of image. The argument always was in the caucus room, "Look, whether you agree with this decision or not, keep quiet because you will do more damage to the party TAPE THREE SIDE A ALEXANDER 42 than it’s worth by disagreeing publicly with the decision." So they always had this pressure on you. Of course you signed a pledge as well to support all caucus decisions in Parliament, which at the time didn't seem very onerous, but as time went on, as you saw the way caucus operated - it wasn't open, it wasn't democratic, it was top-down, decisions very often imposed from outside, from the Cabinet, really.... Yes, so it was very hard to take and I had to get used to a whole new way of operating, really.

EH If it took you with your academic background some time to come to terms with Standing Orders, then it must be very difficult for parliamentarians. How long did it take you to be able to work the Standing Orders and the system to your own purposes?

ALEXANDER I don't know if I ever did really get to that point, even in the six years, but I think it became easier when I later on became a Deputy Speaker and that sort of thing because that forced me to find out more about the Standing Orders. When you were occasionally sitting in the chair having to implement the Standing Orders, you had to listen to the clerks who were sitting next to you say, "Hey this, this and this." So that became quite interesting. I actually, despite myself, became quite interested in that side of things, and having sat in the chair, then once you were back on the back benches it was easier to know when and how to intervene. But that whole process, again, was much, much easier when I was an Independent because then I didn't have to answer to the party hierarchy.

It did take a long time to get used to. I never fully worked out how to operate as a dissident backbencher in that sort of authoritarian party system, and that's one reason why I left in the end. I don't know, I still feel the whole parliamentary system has been taken over by the parties to such a degree that there is no easy way round that; so first you've got the party structure to overcome, then you've got the parliamentary structure and, you know, never the twain shall meet somehow.

EH There was a great deal of idealism reflected in your maiden speech, and also of course your background interests. There was a focus on Labor philosophy, there were the key issues of housing, welfare, city planning, heritage and public transport. How idealistic did you feel when you entered Parliament?

ALEXANDER Pretty much so, I think, but reading back through my first speech I can see that it was also compromised by the fact that I owed something to the party by then. I don't mean the Labor Party in general, I didn't mind owing something to the Labor Party in general because I felt at home in the party, but to the hierarchy. In particular, I looked through first speeches and saw what people say in their first speeches. On the one hand they lay out what they want to do, and on the other hand they thank everybody they think they should. So dutifully I added people like Terry and Brian Burke to it. I think, looking back now, I was toadying really. I think, my God why did I do that? I think I overdid it, you know. TAPE THREE SIDE A ALEXANDER 43

Trying to ingratiate myself is one of my unfortunate tendencies: I think I either go one way or the other, and I think in that speech while the idealism was there, I look at it now and think, oh God, crawling a bit to the Burke brothers.

It was false; they probably saw that it was false, too, but everybody went along with it because that was the way you did things. Even the idealism, I think I was trying to make concessions: the government has started on this wonderful East Perth project, let's encourage them to follow through. What I really wanted to say was, "I think the East Perth development scheme is a bit of a con trick, and unless we're very careful nothing good will happen there." That's what I wanted to say, but I wasn't actually able to say it because if I'd started off in a first speech saying that, I would have been in trouble with the hierarchy right from the beginning so I decided to go the more pragmatic road initially - to my regret later on.

EH That question of East Perth - how much public housing is left there in East Perth, because that was your issue, wasn't it, your desire to see East Perth remaining available to working class people?

ALEXANDER Well that was really in the party platform too and a number of the Highgate people that we talked about in the last interview - Alannah MacTiernan, John McGuire and company - all of us felt very strongly that that part of the party platform, which I think Alannah had a fair bit to do with actually getting into the platform, ie low income housing in and around the city centre, we were very keen to see that part go ahead. So we were very disappointed when gradually but surely the amount of public housing got watered down. I think in '87 when I went into Parliament it was still up at a reasonably high level notionally, but everybody knew it was going to go down in subsequent versions of the plan, which it did, slowly but surely. Now it's only five per cent, I think, and it's not really public housing, it's sort of cooperative housing, which might be just as good but it's a tiny percentage. So it has gradually gotten squeezed out by the realities of the marketplace.

EH So this is bringing up the question of idealism versus pragmatism.

ALEXANDER Yes, you're right.

EH Was this a constant conflict?

ALEXANDER Yes, it was really. In that situation particularly, the government owned most of the land. The government was already putting in millions of dollars into infrastructure and subsidies so we felt a few more million dollars to subsidise some public housing would be a good thing, whereas the way the government looked at it, that was going to prejudice their investment and their partnership with the private sector. That wasn't so much in the Burke days but that argument came up more under Dowding and later under Carmen Lawrence. It seemed to us there TAPE THREE SIDE A ALEXANDER 44 was no good reason for the government not incorporating, perhaps not half as I think the original plans called for (half of that development to be public housing), but maybe twenty per cent rather than the subsequent five.

But how you could actually implement that ideal in the face of government people saying to you, "Well, yes, we agree with your ideal but we've also got to work with the private sector and we've got to attract their dollars and if we put too much public housing in, the people around will get nervous”, which is also true. There were residents of East Perth at that time saying, "Forty per cent is definitely too much; twenty per cent is probably too much as well." They were nervous for their own reasons about public housing going in there, so there were a lot of pressures which you had to recognise would compromise your ideals, even if you didn't want them to.

EH How much did the atmosphere of the late eighties - well, '87 really - influence your ability to be a reformer?

ALEXANDER Quite a lot really. The reform stream was there because, coming back to Homeswest for a minute, for example, even though they didn't build in East Perth as such, they did build other developments in the late eighties, early nineties, in Wellington Street, for example, and in other parts of East Perth, which achieved the same objectives really, as we saw for the East Perth project itself. So that reform element was there and some of it had been installed by the Burke Government itself, so it was there but as time went on and as the financial pressures on the government on the one hand built up (so they didn't have as much money as they did initially), and the scandal sort of started to envelop with Rothwells and what not, that became their preoccupation, ie how to get back the money they'd lost and how to keep the system on track. At the same time economic rationalism was more and more starting to take over the political agenda. I think that meant that the ideals got pushed further and further away.

EH We can go on now and actually talk about the Burke Government. Perhaps if we start with Brian Burke himself and the Cabinet. Brian Burke was still in full control when you came in after the by-election?

ALEXANDER Yes, apart from that little glitch, definitely. I noticed very much when I first got into the caucus how dominant a figure he was. I mean, he was within the party anyway; I'd seen him operate in party forums in general but not in this close forum of the caucus where you felt you were right near the front line, if you like - not necessarily an appropriate analogy but probably accurate, this sort of battle mentality. I was always reminded of the poem Into the Valley of Death Rode the five hundred. Whether they were right or wrong, we were going out there to battle. But Burkie always convinced us that he was right. He was a very enigmatic character. On the one hand, I and my colleagues despised his TAPE THREE SIDE A ALEXANDER 45 pragmatism; on the other hand you couldn't help but admire his skills at sort of massaging people on the one hand and putting out the message on the other that really we were still a party of ideals; that we'd just sort of modified them slightly to take account of a few political and economic realities, but that everything was still okay.

He was a very persuasive speaker and although he definitely manipulated people I don't think I fully realised that until just before or after he'd stepped down. With me, for example, he unexpectedly gave me praise in caucus. I mean, we'd hardly ever spoken to each other and I knew (and I'm sure he did) that our philosophies were poles apart, so I assumed that he was sort of an enemy, if you like, within the party, even though accepting him as leader. He would stand up in caucus and say things like, "Alexander did a fantastic job in the by-election and I see he is already doing good things out in the electorate, so good on you Alexander. If we had more people like you . . . " I thought, "What the....?"

EH He spoke to you using your surname? Was that common for everybody?

ALEXANDER Yes, it was like that - again, back to school days. Occasionally he would throw in a Christian name but usually it was the surname he'd use. Yes, it was very much like school or the army or something. So he would unexpectedly take you in, he'd sort of fold you into his confidence, and you couldn't help but become - I couldn't anyway - wrapped up in this.

Going back to the Vietnamese Buddhist community, for example, they were short of money for their building project (they wanted to build their new temple) and they couldn't get money from the Lotteries Commission, they couldn't get money from here and there for various reasons, so somebody said to me, "Why don't you go and see Burke?" I thought, I cant' do that! But I thought, well, maybe I can! Things were desperate out there, the community looked like it was in real financial trouble, there was going to be political problems apart from anything else, if they went broke. So I went one day and took advantage of a lapse in parliamentary.... I can't remember what it was, the Parliament had broken for some reason there was some fuss on and there was a bit of a lapse in parliamentary proceedings. So Burke was sitting there by himself and I went and sat next to him and I thought, well let's do this and see what happens, and I explained the situation to him and he said, "Well what do they need?" I said, "About $25 000 I think would do it." He said, "Hmmm, a bit unusual, but leave it to me, I'll see what I can do."

This is the way it operated. You could see you were being sort of incorporated one the one hand, but getting what you wanted but on the other. And sure enough in the Budget of that year there was a one-liner - "Vietnamese Buddhist Association $25 000". He got questioned in caucus but Burke said, "Oh that's just to keep Alexander quiet and keep the Vietnamese Buddhists on side." TAPE THREE SIDE A ALEXANDER 46

EH So he said that?

ALEXANDER In caucus, openly, but making a joke of it. Then when it came to be questioned in Parliament, somebody picked it up on the Opposition side, he said "Oh well, this is just a one-off thing. Very valuable community service these people are doing", and very glibly explained it away and so it got through. That was just the result of a chance interaction of me and him one day in the Parliament. On the one hand he kept his control over people and on the other hand he sort of kept his favour out in the community, because what other Premier had got $25 000 for this mob before or since?

END OF TAPE 3 SIDE A TAPE THREE SIDE B ALEXANDER 47

EH Would this be an example of Brian Burke's ability to attend to detail? He could do the global thing, but remember that small detail. Did he keep a grip on everything like that?

ALEXANDER Well he seemed to. When you talked to other backbenchers in a similar position, they had done the same sorts of things for similar reasons. He was very keen to see the party continue to be seen well in the electorate, so if he could do something to help a backbencher liaise with his electorate, whether it was money or otherwise, he would do it if he possibly could. So he was very, very good at doing that, yes. I guess that related to his own experiences in his own electorate; that was how he massaged his own electorate. I mean, I see it now as a very cynical exercise, but at the time I thought, oh he's doing the right thing.

EH That's a very interesting example of control. How did he exercise control.... should we take the Cabinet first and then we'll move on to caucus? What were your observations of Cabinet? Was it a similar sort of control?

ALEXANDER Yes, well this is only second hand, of course, because I was only on the outside of it. Evidently he would take very much a dominant role in Cabinet and quite often he would make decisions without properly consulting Cabinet, or so the story said. So he and a small group of people around him - I guess maybe David Parker and others that he worked closely with, Mal Bryce on occasions and a few of the other senior Cabinet ministers....

EH Who would have been his closest confidants?

ALEXANDER I think probably Joe Berinson was one of them. I was never quite sure about the strength of the relationship between those two but he certainly, according to all the stories, turned to Joe Berinson for advice when he was in difficulty making a decision, but then other people who were in the Cabinet who were prepared to talk to us would say he'd very often come into Cabinet with his mind already made up on a particular issue, and he had the debating and the personal skills to roll most of his decisions through, even if there was philosophical or even pragmatic objection to them. I think he used the same technique in the caucus really. We'd complain, "Well the caucus is supposed to make this decision, not the Cabinet," and he'd say, "Well, if you guys want to stay in government, you've just got to go along with the Cabinet. You can go out there and criticise the Cabinet decision if you like, but you'll look bloody silly because I'll say, 'These people are being disloyal to the Labor Party' et cetera, et cetera. So he'd turn things on their head.

I suppose it was a bit silly to think really that the caucus would actually make the decisions on matters of policy. What really happened, I think, was a small group within the Cabinet made the decision, rolled it through the Cabinet, the Cabinet would then come into caucus and, because TAPE THREE SIDE B ALEXANDER 48 anyway they were seventeen out of forty-eight or something we had at the time I went in, with a few stragglers they could easily actually get the numbers to get it through - a majority even if they didn't have that support to start with. But if they didn't have the numbers they used this moral suasion tactic: "Look I'm sorry we've had to make this decision. Yes, yes, yes, we should've done it the other way round but the reality is we've got to be abreast of this issue, we had to make the decision, you've got to back us up."

Burke was very good at using that steamrollering method, although it didn't really seem like a steamroller. When Dowding came in later on he was much less subtle, funnily enough. You could see that he was adopting the same tactics but he didn't do it as skilfully and so there was a lot more resentment at the way he operated.

EH There were such contrasting personalities but very strong personalities within that Cabinet, wasn't there?

ALEXANDER Yes, that's true.

EH People like Yvonne Henderson, who you'd mentioned earlier.

ALEXANDER She didn't come in initially; I think she got in in late '87 or early '88.

EH And she obviously wasn't a popular choice from Brian Burke's point of view.

ALEXANDER No, as far as he was concerned she was the last person he wanted in Cabinet. She was very articulate, very talented and very keen on pursuing social issues in particular. I don't suppose Burke saw her as a threat to himself personally but he saw her as a threat to the way he operated because she was prepared to, like other people in the Left tried to do, front up with these issues and say, "Well style is all very well, but look at the substance of what we are doing: we're starting to cut back on social welfare, we're ignoring these housing issues," et cetera, et cetera. There was a lot of complaint in the community and from the welfare sector at the way in which Budget cuts were slowly but surely shifting resources away from the social sector.

EH Who else from the Left faction did you have in Cabinet?

ALEXANDER At the time I don't think there were that many.

[break in recording]

EH We were talking about the strength of the Burke Cabinet in general. Obviously people of great ability from the public's point of view, people like Joe Berinson, Bob Pearce, Carmen Lawrence, Peter TAPE THREE SIDE B ALEXANDER 49

Dowding, David Parker, but Burke was still the completely dominant figure.

ALEXANDER Very much so. When he departed unexpectedly there was a sort of vacuum. People weren't ready for the fact that he resigned anyway and were puzzled by it because the full knowledge of what was going on wasn't there, and so there wasn't much talk, if any, amongst the Left. Although they resented Burke there wasn't much talk of trying to replace him or anything like that because they sort of said, "Well yes we've got to put up with him because he's so good at selling the party that that'll keep us in power." This is how it was rationalised. So there was a ready acceptance of him as leader, I think, and even if he'd stayed I don't think there was any possibility of a challenge at all.

EH The October crash of '87, the stock market crash, was that the first indication of questions over Rothwells and then WA Inc? When did murmurings start to filter through?

ALEXANDER As far as I remember, Erica, that was the first time that we'd heard anything much in caucus about it. There were little rumblings in the press earlier in the year, shortly after I got in there, but nothing much. … Well there were questions in Parliament, and certainly the Opposition was starting to pursue the issue a little bit more vigorously than they had.

EH What did you think of that?

ALEXANDER Well, I was in two minds about it really, because I could see, or at least I thought I could see that some of what they were saying was accurate, and yet on the other hand because they were attacking the government and the party of which I was a part, I sort of joined in the game - "Oh this is just the Opposition exaggerating things. They're not really as bad as they say, they've got the wrong end of the stick," and for various reasons rationalised it away in a sense, although we - we being a few of us in the Left faction of the caucus - were keen to try and pursue the issues as far as we could within the caucus to find out more, for a start, about what was going on.

When Rothwells was first rescued - I think it was late '87, just after the crash - somehow we were sucked in by the Burke charisma, which sort of told us that "This looks terribly bad, but it's not as bad as you think." He would say, "Trust me" and with his open eyes and looking us straight in the face you couldn't help but think, oh yeah, okay, all right, we'll give him the benefit of the doubt. He convinced the caucus fairly quickly that anything that would be said about rescuing Rothwells and the links between Connell and the government, that was just people trying to put the government down and trying to sort of interpret it in the wrong light.

He'd say, "I agonised over that decision all night. I knew that people would criticise this decision because it looks bad," and that why I think in TAPE THREE SIDE B ALEXANDER 50 the end he handed over the final formal part of the decision-making to his deputy, I think, because he didn't want to be seen to be actually signing the bit of paper that gave the start of all those funds to Laurie Connell and his mates. So he openly recognised the political risks, if you like, but he didn't really tell the full story, or anything like it, about what was really going on. He convinced us that it was necessary for Labor politically to do this, even though he also convinced us that it was against his better judgment and that somehow it was in the best interests of everybody.

But quite often I think these agendas of personal political survival, party political survival and what was actually going on got all mixed up, and the priorities, when you look back at them, were quite wrong, I think.

EH Another issue, and I'm not sure if I've got the time right, was Notre Dame and the land grant. Was this about the same time as Rothwells?

ALEXANDER I think it might have started then but it didn't actually come into the open until a couple of years later when Dowding was Premier and Ian Taylor was deputy, I seem to remember at that time. Although I think the decisions to give money to Notre Dame were made some time during '88, probably after Brian Burke had disappeared from the formal scene but I wouldn't be at all surprised if he'd had something to do with setting it up with Horgan and company to begin with. But we knew nothing about that at the time. It was there in the background and certainly Parker made the formal commitment to give some sort of support to Notre Dame before the '89 election, but by that time Peter Dowding was Premier, I think.

EH We'll follow that up later because you had something to say about Notre Dame I think.

ALEXANDER Yes, quite a bit, although Frank Donovan did more of the running on that issue than I did because he was on the financial committee of the Parliament that actually probed it in detail.

EH We'll leave that issue; I just wasn't sure whether it was the same time.

ALEXANDER Just a little later. You're right - I think it started then but it didn't come out into the open until later on.

EH This is an interesting way to start to talk about the Left faction. How difficult was it to get information?

ALEXANDER Very difficult really. Ian Taylor was one of the Left people in Cabinet that I couldn't recall just now. He was there because he was the golden-haired boy as far as Burke was concerned. To Burke, Taylor was an acceptable person from the Left to have in the Cabinet, whereas Yvonne Henderson wasn't; she was too open in her opposition TAPE THREE SIDE B ALEXANDER 51 to Burke's approach and policies. Ian was prepared to submerge that in order to get where he wanted to go. But even getting information from Ian Taylor, who was right inside the Cabinet, to the caucus was very difficult. He would only occasionally come to Left faction meetings.

Left faction meetings themselves were a bit of a no-no apparently until about '86 or '87. Burke told them that it was inappropriate for members of Parliament to meet as a group - faction members. He knew that the faction met outside with McGinty and company, but of course McGinty was fairly close to Burke so probably information got back to Burke about what actually happened there, but he didn't have a sure source of information so he operated as well from the Left caucus in the Parliament back to himself, and so he was very nervous, I think, about the Left faction starting to meet and him not having a sure source of information about what went on at the meetings.

So for a while there that was enough to prevent the Left faction from even meeting, but by the time Frank and I got into Parliament there were, I think, sixteen members of the caucus out of a total of forty-eight, nominally, at least, members of the Left. We met on a weekly basis but we sort of met without Ian Taylor mostly, because he said he had too many other things to do and probably did. He couldn't get there so we couldn't ask him about Cabinet, and when we did somehow he came along not so much as a member of the Left, we felt, but as a representative of the Cabinet. See, he'd been incorporated into that little cabal. You know, "This might not be a decision I support but Cabinet's made it, so we've just got to go along with it," that sort of approach.

It certainly wasn't a two-way process as far as information was concerned. He'd come along and hear what we had to say but it was much harder getting information from him and other people in the similar position back the other way.

EH How did you go about building alliances then? Was it through the Left faction? What was Jim McGinty's role?

ALEXANDER He was a convenor of the Left faction in the lay party, if you like, as opposed to the parliamentary party, and also because he was a key union figure in the Miscellaneous Workers Union, he was very well placed to devote time and resources to Labor Party backroom methods. Even though that wasn't his main job you might have been forgiven for thinking it was, the way he spent huge amounts of time on Labor Party business. That was where we did our networking, I think, more out in the branches and in the electorate councils and in the Left faction overall.

We tried to build up the effectiveness of the Left caucus in Parliament House, but we never got the full sixteen in attendance regularly. Many of them drifted in and out, weren't fully committed, we felt, to really sort of pursuing Left causes, as such, and because also once you get into Parliament you're overtaken a bit by your electorate business and other TAPE THREE SIDE B ALEXANDER 52 priorities, which I hadn't realised would take so much time, weren't able to devote sufficient energy to the building up of that faction and its influence as we would have liked. And all the time also it was against formidable odds - pressure from Burke initially, pressure from Dowding, who was equally sceptical of the Left. I mean, he would recognise it as a group, occasionally he would need our support in caucus, but most of the time they had the numbers to get things through without the Left anyway. So even if the Left was cohesive enough to oppose a particular initiative or decision, as it was from time to time, it didn't have the numbers. So it was not effective, except as an occasional ginger group.

EH You couldn't build an alliance with the Centre? The Right was the dominant faction, wasn't it?

ALEXANDER That's right. That had, if not a majority, very close to it. There was the Centre-Left faction, which sort of coalesced around Bob Pearce at the time, and then there was an Independent faction, which sort of appealed to me in some sense philosophically, but they were very far from the Left ideologically.

EH Who did that coalesce around?

ALEXANDER A fellow called Garry Kelly, who was from South Metropolitan province, was the convenor of that group. It was only a very small group initially, but it grew gradually, I think. They opposed the idea of factions, really, within the party, and thought it was more of a liability than an asset. In some ways I think they were dead right but on the other hand they also switched their votes without apparent consistency, so they seemed to be too independent in a sense. They didn't appear to have any guiding philosophy other than what was right on the day, or so we thought anyway.

Occasionally Fred McKenzie, the convenor of the Left in the caucus, would talk to Bob Pearce about particular issues, but it was very rare for those issues to be taken up in the caucus room formally, say, by an alliance of the Left and the Centre-Left, or the Left and the Independents, usually because we'd been warned off by Cabinet, or agents from Cabinet. Ian Taylor or Bob Pearce would come and say, "Look, we agree with what you're doing but you're not going to succeed, you're just going to destabilise so don't do it." Most people in that situation would think, okay, this is not appropriate or it's not going to work, or a combination of the two. Opposition would become token and would tend to be restricted to one or two individuals who had the courage to stand up in caucus and openly oppose Burke - which I didn't have in the early days. Well, he was only there for a year and I don't think I ever took him on directly; I was too scared basically. [laughs] He succeeded in incorporating me.

EH What was the closest that you came? Was it only when you became an Independent that you really took them on or was there a process? TAPE THREE SIDE B ALEXANDER 53

ALEXANDER It was really. When I was outside the party structure it was much easier to do it from outside. Inside, there was also the other factor that was operating, I think; my own ambition. Because Burke had sort of decided that Alexander was okay, for purposes of public consumption anyway, he would also say things in caucus, not just to me but to other new backbenchers aspiring to the Cabinet, "Oh, yes, there's good Cabinet material down there. I never thought Alexander would be Cabinet material, but maybe he is, the way he's going." And I'd think, am I just being played for a sucker (which I think I was) or does he really mean that? So because I was keen to get into the Cabinet, probably for reasons of personal ambition on the one hand but also because I could see there was a chance of doing something more useful at that level on the other, I think I let that take over my normally questioning, probing style, and I became a little bit of a wimp in caucus, basically, because I was compromised by Burke's very clever incorporation mechanisms. It only became clear to me after the Perth City Council incident in Parliament that Burke was playing me for the sucker that I was at that time.

EH Can you describe that incident?

ALEXANDER As I remember it, Burke was away at the time, right, and when the boss is away the mice do play, sort of thing. It is very much like a school, isn't it, in a sense? I was due to give a speech in a Budget session and they were short of people to speak and so I said to Bob Pearce, who was Leader of the House, I think at that point, "I'd like to talk about the Perth City Council, Bob", and he said, "Oh yeah, what are you going to do?", and I said, "Well I'm going to have a go at them." He said, "That's a good idea," and he gave me to understand that he thought it was a good idea because it would take the heat of the government at the time. They saw it as way to divert attention from bigger problems, eg, WA Inc, which, as we've said, was just coming into the news. So, if Burke had been there I may not have ever got that opportunity. He might have said, "No, don't let Alexander go, he's a loose cannon, or could be".

Anyway, Bob Pearce encouraged me to do this (he was also Minister for Planning at the time) and he agreed with me that things weren't right at the Perth City Council for a whole host of reasons. So I gave a speech in which I drew attention to what I thought was (and still do) corruption at Council House, you know, the sort of stuff we talked about last time - the way in which those councillors used their position to get their own financial interests pursued or fulfilled - and I laid it out fairly clearly why I thought that was the case. I went through a number of decisions, including the redevelopment of the Boans site, which we talked about last time, and a number of others where the Lord Mayor, in particular at the time, Mick Michael, had declared an interest, yes, but subsequently he'd also got the contract. So it seemed to me somehow the process was being subverted.

So having researched that fairly carefully, having talked to the media about it, the 7.30 Report had actually put out a 10-minute report (Vicki TAPE THREE SIDE B ALEXANDER 54

Laurie put it together) sort of outlining my case, Mick Michael had slapped a writ on me and the ABC in response to that 7.30 Report. So I was no longer able to speak publicly about it without risking more court action. Even though it was fairly clear it was what they call a 'stop writ', it intimidated me enough to shut me up, so I thought, hang on, I can get around this by talking in Parliament, because parliamentary privilege meant that they couldn't touch me legally with anything I said there. So that really set the cat among the pigeons. I had again underestimated the impact that it would have.

It was on the front page of the paper the next day - 'Corruption in Council House - Alexander says,' or something like that, a big banner headline. So it became a story for a few days and the Opposition, being the Opposition and seeing that I was getting some support from Bob Pearce who was Leader of the House at the time, tried to turn it, ironically, into an attack on me and the Labor Party, even though I think they could see that some of the things I said might have been close to the truth. So it became an issue for the whole of the government to defend, you know, Alexander's speaking the truth here and it's the Opposition that's got it wrong.

But when Burke came back, he was clearly very angry. He thought I'd overstepped the mark and I guess what he was saying, although I don't think I fully realised it at the time, I was offending friends of the party. The powerbrokers were getting nervous that I might actually be inadvertently getting close to the real truth, the underlying sort of WA Inc truth, if you like.

EH Did you have a sense that you might be?

ALEXANDER Yes, I did, and I think Burke at the time… initially he said in caucus, "Yeah, Alexander's done a good job," although I could see that he really didn't think that because he was angry and said so (not directly to me, but to other people who then said it to me), but he thought, I think, that he could use this device to distract attention from the broader issue, even though the two were linked. So he went in to bat on my behalf because the Opposition started attacking me saying, "Where's your proof of corruption?" I had to then say things like, "Well I haven't actually seen money change hands. What I'm talking about is official corruption, that is the use of influence for favours in exchange, and it's not actually money changing hands." They said, "Oh, that's not real corruption. You can't prove it anyway." Well, I couldn't. I didn't actually have a tape recording of anybody saying to anybody, "If you do this, I'll do this," but everybody knew that's the way it operated, including the planners at Council House who used to say when the Lord Mayor of the day came through the door, "Oh, here's the Lord Mayor's next building contract!" So they knew what was going on, the people in the know did, but you couldn't actually prove it in a court of law, or you would have great difficulty.

TAPE THREE SIDE B ALEXANDER 55

So I got myself into a bit of a pickle over the definition of corruption, and Burke helped me get off the hook there. This was again part of his process. Initially he said to me, "Look Ian, I'll get the Local Government Department people to look at this and write it up and we'll get some sort of inquiry going into the council, okay?" I went along with that because I suppose I was a bit nervous that because I couldn't fully substantiate my case I might be sort of left to hang out to dry and the whole thing would collapse - and me with it. So it seemed that I was getting some support from Burke.

I don't remember the dates but I think it was somewhere round October- November that Burke put out a story to the press saying that he was going to support a full inquiry into the Perth City Council come what may, and then a week later, somehow or other, he changed his mind. He came into caucus and said, "I'm not going to have an inquiry into the Perth City Council. It's not warranted. Alexander shouldn't ever have gone public on it this in the first place." He didn't talk to me about this before the meeting, and he said, "What the hell were you doing Alexander. Stand up and explain." He said "We'll have some sort of lesser inquiry into...." this is Bob Pearce's compromise, "....the planning powers of the council and how they may have been abused and what we need to do about that in general," rather than the particular allegations that I was raising.

Because I was still under Burke's thumb at that point I said something rather weak like, "Oh well, that's a bit disappointing, but I accept your decision. If that's the case perhaps I shouldn't have raised it in this forum." I think I might have even apologised - totally inappropriate looking back at it. He'd squashed me, really, and he'd sort of pulled the rug out from under my feet. Right up to the point of that caucus meeting he was openly supporting me. He had to defend me in Parliament on a couple of occasions, and did it quite skilfully. Then all of a sudden, for his own reasons, he'd pulled the rug out from under my feet and made me the villain in caucus. I'd got it wrong all of a sudden, even though he'd never said that before openly.

So a number of caucus members who didn't really have an interest one way or the other in the particular issue I was raising, thought, "Burke's right. Alexander's just a bloody troublemaker." So from then on, in Burke's eyes, I was back to the role of being a troublemaker, and clearly at that point he withdrew any support for me. I felt, well, okay, perhaps I'm back in the position I started in, and I think I approached things different from then on. It was a very good learning exercise for me, to be very wary of that sort of support from the top, if it wasn't really genuine, and I could see that I'd been sucked in by then.

EH Let's continue this Rothwells' link because you said you had a sense that there was a link and it was all around the same time or following on. Was it through the media that you really started.... well, there'd been the first Rothwells' rescue - that you were wondering?

TAPE THREE SIDE B ALEXANDER 56

ALEXANDER Yes, through conversations with individual journalists who knew more than I did, and some party members who were worried about the issue and pursuing it as much as they could within that constraint. I didn't really get a chance to investigate it because there was so much else going on that we were just caught up with the day-to-day politics and survival in the electorate, because the boundaries of the seat of Perth also changed at that time and that meant that, from what was a very safe seat on paper, Labor suddenly became marginal. I believe that was deliberate. Not just that; there were a number of other seats were made marginal. That's another story though.

EH We'll follow that up.

ALEXANDER But as far as the WA Inc thing was concerned, I think we knew that Connell, in particular, was close to the other WA Inc players, including some of the Perth City Council people, because Connell and Bond and company were all lending each other money for these dodgy city building projects that were going on at the time that the WA Development Corporation was involved in - Central Park and the redevelopment of the Perth Tech site in particular. We got to find out some of the details mainly through the Press; The Western Mail and a few other sort of marginal publications started to look at these in a bit more detail. So I'd sort of scratched around from time to time and made contact with people who were investigating these things and, from conversations with them, knew that there were a whole lot of shady connections that needed to be uncovered. But at the same time, you see, people in the caucus were very nervous of pursuing those issues openly

END OF TAPE 3 SIDE B TAPE FOUR SIDE A ALEXANDER 57

ALEXANDER ....issues that could bring the government down, and so we were in a bind really, because if you pursued them you were sort of threatening yourself and the government of which you were a small part. The other thing that happened to me after raising that stuff in Parliament was personal intimidation and threatening phone calls. I got a couple of phone calls at the office from people who said things like, "You know what happened to the last person who pursued these sort of issues at the Perth City Council?" and I'd say, "No." "Well somebody like," - and they wouldn't name - "they got their house burnt and they got their car burnt. Now I'm just warning you, friendly; this is a friendly warning …" So that sort of phone became, well, not exactly common, but I got at least two or three like that. So worried I was that I went to the police at one point. I should've known better that they wouldn't be interested; they certainly weren't.

EH What was their response? That's quite shocking, isn't it?

ALEXANDER They didn't believe me basically. All they said was, "Well this is just a part of being in politics. You've got to expect this sort of thing." I guess they had other things on their minds. I didn't fully trust the police anyway for all sorts of other reasons so I didn't pursue it there. We did get the office swept for bugs because through trying to investigate the East Perth development scheme and land ownership there - something that I've still not done, but I really would dearly love to do, maybe too late now - who owns the land and who's benefited from all those deals there.

Every time I mentioned the name of the former member for Perth, Terry Burke, funnily enough - and this happened in two or three separate conversations - the phone went dead, so I suspected at that point my phones were being bugged as well and started to get a bit paranoid. We had the office swept for bugs; they couldn't find anything, or said they couldn't. Whether I got carried away with my own paranoia at that point, I'm not sure, but I was certainly feeling threatened, and I suspect my phone was being bugged as well - by who I'm still not entirely sure. But I guess I was becoming more than just a minor irritant in the side of the powers that be, and that, I suppose, scared me off too. I had my family to think of as well, and my wife was pretty worried by this, naturally. She could see us losing all of our financial, if not other assets - few as they were at the time. So all of those things persuaded me to go more softly on the issue.

It was a very difficult issue to pursue, and looking back on what I said about the council last time we talked, it was the same thing, the same process, like intimidation, people in power for positions initially supporting but then withdrawing their support as you got closer to the truth, trying to use you as much as they could, but when they realised they couldn't, then openly putting obstacles in your way - and perhaps worse. By that time, I think it was 1988 and, as I said, the seat of Perth was starting to look a bit shaky on paper so I had to put all my energies into the start of the re- TAPE FOUR SIDE A ALEXANDER 58 election campaign, and that became the priorities of the local branch and local branches everywhere, probably, winning the next election.

EH Just before we leave WA Inc, everything seems to be interlinked and interwoven, doesn't it. People like Bond and Connell, the Curtin Foundation and the government corporations.

ALEXANDER Yes, and those links never became entirely clear until the royal commission, I guess. When the second Rothwells rescue came around, I think it was some time during 1988 when Dowding was Premier and Parker was the deputy, Parker managed to convince enough doubters in the caucus that that rescue was necessary, not just for economic but also for political reasons. He sort of said things like, "Our political survival depends on this." "Trust us, we'll get a petrochemical plant going," although many of us were highly sceptical about that happening.

EH Yes, the petrochemical plant must have really gone against your grain completely.

ALEXANDER Yes it did, both environmentally and philosophically. We didn't think this was the sort of thing the government should be getting into at all. And yet, you see, on the other hand, there were people in the party, particularly some right-wing union powerbrokers, who argued, "Well maybe a petrochemical plant is not such a bad thing. It would provide jobs - you know, unemployment was starting to get worse - and while it might be environmentally hazardous, we could get that under control with certain safeguards, blah, blah, blah." So they said, "You really shouldn't be opposing this project. Environmentally it's not a problem and could bring economic benefits," they argued.

That put us in a bit of a log jam as well because we were unable to get to support in the wider party, particularly from the unions, because some of them, at least, were in my view hoodwinked by the rhetoric, that this was a real project that would provide real jobs. I think a lot of them saw through it and fought it for those very reasons - unions on the Left in particular, the CMEU and others.

So there was sufficient doubt in people's minds about the real value of that project, and the political risks of not going ahead with it, that convinced people to come and either support it or not oppose it openly.

EH The sort of people that were involved, like Dempster, Bond, Connell and others, were not Labor. I mean, this was really the big end of town, to use the jargon, wasn't it?

ALEXANDER Yes, that is right.

EH This wasn't the usual Labor Party connections at all. How did that fit? TAPE FOUR SIDE A ALEXANDER 59

ALEXANDER Not very well, I think, but you see Burke again was able to argue, and Dowding following him, that while these people were clearly, as you say, representing the big end of town, they were also new establishment rather than old establishment people. So Burke was able to sort of manipulate, I suppose, people's feelings, by saying, "This is the anti-establishment establishment. These boys, even though they seem to be rough around the edges, and even though they seem to be doing some shady things, they're actually going to shake up the real establishment." I think people were, to some extent, taken in by that initially.

EH The rough around the edges must have grated with people.

ALEXANDER It did, but I don't think we really knew how rough around the edges they were, [laughs] or didn't want to know, you know what I mean? It was clearly a marriage of convenience between the Labor Party and these entrepreneurs and yet somehow it kept Labor going, so it was sort of like the devil's dilemma really. We were hooked up to the devil, right or wrong, and so we had to keep on going in that direction, even though many of us could see clearly that it was the wrong direction for a start, but that somehow it had all got out of control and it was they that were calling the shots now and whatever we did wasn't going to make any difference.

EH And the role of the Curtin Foundation? Did people know?

ALEXANDER They knew enough to see that things weren't right, but again the instinct for political survival, I think, took over and people therefore either kept quiet or kept their doubts to themselves, largely, and whenever the subject came up they'd sort of say, "Oh yes, we've got a problem here but we've also got to get ourselves re-elected, so let's concentrate on that and deal with the real problem later on."

EH And it was twelve months away, wasn't it?

ALEXANDER Yes, exactly.

EH Burke's resignation in February '88 - was that a shock?

ALEXANDER Yes - well, at least it was to most members of the caucus. It took them completely by surprise. Nobody was quite sure of the reasons, and they were never fully explained. The last thing Burke said to us in caucus was, "Whatever people say about me in the future, and they'll say a lot of critical things, and a lot of very hurtful things, remember that all I was trying to do was promote the interests of the Labor Party." He said, "Don't think ill of me." So he was desperate to retain his credibility with the party.

TAPE FOUR SIDE A ALEXANDER 60

We could see by then that there was something seriously wrong, otherwise he wouldn't have suddenly disappeared from the scene. Although he always rationalised by saying, "When I first got the job I said I wouldn't stay for longer than five years, and it's just five years so it's just the time for me to get out." People didn't really swallow that line but neither did they really know the truth. They wanted to believe that he'd resigned for the right reasons and they weren't prepared to push it any further, I think.

EH His appointment as the Ambassador to Ireland....

ALEXANDER That was extraordinary!

EH .... and perhaps the connections with Bob Hawke. What did you make of that?

ALEXANDER Well, it was sort of beyond understanding really. The other thing of course that was happening at that time was that Hawke was doing lots of deals with national powerbrokers of the similar ilk to the local WA Inc powerbrokers, and Connell was somehow mixed up in all of that too, and I guess Bond was as well. So you could sort of see there were very dodgy things happening, but again you didn't know the full extent. And because these people had political charisma and political power, and our own fortunes were tied up with that, I think that again overrode our better judgment and pushed those issues down the priority list of those to deal with.

[break in recording]

EH We finished last time talking about the power structures in the Labor Party at the end of 1989 and the pressures of political life. Can we go directly now to your electoral office and what was involved there, where it was located? I believe there was a break-in at one stage that added to the air of conspiracy - true or false.

ALEXANDER Quite.

EH Can we talk about that first this morning?

ALEXANDER Fine, Erica. The electorate office was up on Walcott Street, 160 Walcott Street, just around the corner from William Street. It certainly wasn't my first choice because I wanted to be somewhere near the heart of the electorate, as it then was, which would have been perhaps closer to central Perth, down in Highgate or Northbridge. But it happened that one Terry Burke, the previous member, just happened to own a house up there where he'd had his own office, and he said, "Look Ian, this is available", and having been surprised by the preselection that we talked about before he then turned all very friendly and, you know, give you anything you wanted - advice: "Yes, you're part of the team now," sort of stuff, including "We can give you this bargain office up there TAPE FOUR SIDE A ALEXANDER 61 in Walcott Street." I thought, "Well, is this a good idea or not?" I talked to a few people about it and we thought, oh well, there are more important things in life than worrying about the location of the electorate office at this stage. Let's just take it and find a better location later on."

Well, we never did as it turned out, and, ironically, I ended up in an office located in a house owned by the previous member for Perth who, in ideological terms, was our sort of arch enemy. It was a bit eerie having Terry come in at various times to sort of inspect. There was a flat next door which he rented out from time to time, or where some of his rellies stayed, so he'd always be sort of breezing through. "Just saying hello folks; how are things going?", and we'd always think, oh God, what's he looking for this time? Because we saw that, internally in the party at least, we were working for quite different ends, than his team had been. So that was all a little bit disquieting in a way.

Subsequently, when the office was broken into - I think it was '88 or perhaps early '89, around the time I was dealing with those council matters that I'd raised in Parliament - a file named Burke disappeared, and that was about the only thing, apart from some petty cash, that we could find that was missing, which was really odd. Another time the office was broken into and all sorts of equipment was taken, including computers, which was a very different sort of break-in, but the first one was a minor one with just this Burke file removed. There was nothing much in it because it was early days and we weren't going to store any sensitive material right there anyway. That was odd, and we never got to the bottom of that. As I think we might have said last time, at various times it seemed that the telephones might have been tapped and there were all sorts of indications of things going on.

EH We didn't actually record those indications.

ALEXANDER Didn't we? Okay, that must have been a conversation after we finished. It was people ringing up when I raised the matter of Mick Michael in Parliament and there was all that publicity surrounding it, and the press got more interested than usual and one day I remember a guy ringing me up and almost threatening me, saying, "You know what happened to the last person who raised these sorts of issues with Mr Michael?" I said, "No." He said, "Well his car bombed and his house was splashed with paint." I said, "Are you threatening me?" and he said, "Oh, no", and the phone just sort of went dead, just as I was getting a bit worried and thinking maybe we should get somebody to trace the call. We couldn't.

Then on other occasions I happened to be talking about the previous member for Perth and possible connections with shady deals in and around the city, and two or three times when I was having those sorts of conversations around the issue of land deals and potential corruption and so on, each time, funnily enough when the same sort of topic came up, the phone went dead. TAPE FOUR SIDE A ALEXANDER 62

I thought at first, this is just my paranoia at work, but when it happened several times with the same sorts of conversations going on, I thought somebody's got to be tapping these phones. Barbara, who was the electorate officer - a fantastic person, coping in a crisis all the time - shared those concerns, and so we got the government people in to sweep the office. Well they didn't find anything, or said they didn't. We weren't sure given the circumstances and the way the government actually operated if those people were really doing the job we asked them to do. You know, you got to the point where you felt you couldn't trust anybody, which was crazy. Anyway we thought well, if they didn't find any evidence we haven't got any other way of finding any evidence of phone taps. Maybe it was just coincidence, who knows. Maybe there was a van hovering around the corner listening to particular calls, one could never be sure. We just moved on to the next thing, but it was quite worrying at the time.

EH Was the second break-in after you went Independent?

ALEXANDER No, I think it was before, actually, Erica. It was quite a common thing at one stage for members of Parliament's offices to be broken into. I think whoever they were doing this realised that (a) the security wasn't very good - we were just in a house which had very poorly designed locking systems, didn't even have the normal deadlocks and things that we have now; and (b) there was a lot of easily stolen equipment - computers, Xerox machines, et cetera - which were ready to hand and very rarely were electorate offices open at night - or people could see if there was somebody in there at night. So they were easy targets, I think, although there were all sorts of theories going around at the time as to other things more sinister happening.

EH The other thing we didn't talk about was the committees that you were on in this first period. I think you mentioned that you actually felt like you had been distracted by the committee work. What committees were you on and was this true?

ALEXANDER In a sense it was, although I learnt quite a lot. In the early days of '87, just after I'd been elected to Parliament, it was sort of convention that backbenchers got allocated to a select committee to give them a focus other than their parliamentary work. You can read that in two ways: firstly you did learn something by going on to a committee looking at a particular issue you might be interested in - or you might not; and the second was that we felt that the executive was keen to divert us into activities that would keep us busy so we wouldn't be scrutinising the parliamentary program too much, or had the time to devote to it that maybe would have liked to. So we were a bit ambivalent - meaning Frank Donovan and myself who were the newly elected backbenchers at the time.

Anyway Burke came up to us one day and said, "I've got a committee on sewerage and I want you guys to go on it", and we just sort of looked at TAPE FOUR SIDE A ALEXANDER 63 each other and said, "What's this? The shitty committee, Brian", I think Frank might have said, so thereafter it became the shitty committee to look at Perth's sewerage disposal problems, which, laughs apart, was quite an interesting topic.

There was just three of us: there was Frank Donovan, me and Ian Thompson, the member for Kalamunda I think he was at the time, the Liberal member for Kalamunda. Ironically, about three years later, the three of us who were on that committee all went Independent. So we reckoned it backfired on Burke because we got a lot of time to talk about our position in the party, how we felt as backbenchers. There was Ian Thompson, who'd been there twenty years as a dissident Liberal backbencher fighting the Court administration and was very unhappy in that role from time to time, and Frank and I sort of in a parallel position within the Labor Party. So I'm sure that committee experience - we spent a lot of time together, as you do on committees - influenced our subsequent political behaviour to some extent.

Anyway it was an interesting experience, although it did take a lot of time. There were a few ironies in it. I remember Ian Taylor, who was, I think, Minister for Finance at the time, he said, "Now look lads, this select committee, don't use it as a junket. So many politicians do." Now I think he might have had his tongue in his cheek at the time, but I sort of took him seriously and thought "Well right, that's fair enough. Why should we waste public money?" I still believe this going around the world, as many select committees do, investigating the disposal of sewerage, you could go anywhere to have a look at efficient systems in the USA or inefficient systems in some third world country, say, but we chose not to.

I somehow got to be chairman of the committee and I said, "Well, we're not going to waste money on travel, number one; whereas other committees set up at the same time with other new or recently elected backbenchers got themselves trips everywhere. The Soil Degradation Committee, I think it was, travelled to Africa, America, Russia, Europe - you name it. I think it was an absolute rort. So I was glad that we didn't really take the same path, but it was ironic that I took the advice seriously because people later said to me "Why did you take that advice seriously? Ian, these committees, they're just an excuse for travel." I thought, "Oh well, there you go; it's another part of this club system." But this operated across the parties - sort of wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Just ask the Speaker for a couple of hundred thousand and he'll approve it, even if it's not in the original budget. That's how it seemed to work.

Anyway, apart from that, it did take quite a lot of time. We did hearings, locally, we did go to Sydney and Melbourne - spent most of our time looking down septic tanks, as I recall, so that wasn't much fun. I think, subsequently, Frank Donovan and Ian Thompson went to New Zealand to a conference - that didn't seem too lavish, either and it was right on the topic.

TAPE FOUR SIDE A ALEXANDER 64

EH What was it, the sewers of Paris? [laughs]

ALEXANDER They would have liked to have gone to a conference in Paris, gone down the sewers of Paris or the sewers of London, as people do under the streets, yes, do those tours. [laughs] Yes lots of possibilities we missed.

We made our report about eighteen months later, in the middle of '89 maybe, I can't quite remember now. No, the middle of '88 it would have been because this was early '87 we started. We made a lot of recommendations to improve Perth's sewerage system. There was a huge sewerage backlog in Perth at the time; only about half of the city was sewered. They are still working on the backlog. The current government finally announced a program in '94 to sewer suburbs which had never been connected, but we made those recommendations (as committees before us had done several years earlier) and recommended big expenditure. The government took very little notice.

We recommended they should look at alternatives, septic tanks systems, which seemed to have some promise, rather than the conventional ones, et cetera, et cetera, but all of those recommendations just fell on deaf ears. Our committee, only three of us, took this seriously and raised the matter in Parliament whenever we could in as forceful a way as possible from the back bench, but ministers managed to just quietly bury the recommendations. That was a learning experience as well.

EH It's worth following that up, isn't it, because from your background in geography and environmental concerns, sewerage for Perth, being on a sand plain, is a really important issue, isn't it?

ALEXANDER Yes, that's true. I mean I did have an interest in it from that point of view, although physical geography was never my strength. I could see that, yes, from a developmental and environmental angle, it was an important topic. We had a lot of really good people who came in and gave us evidence based on their own experience in the area - not just bureaucrats, but interested members of the public. It drew in a very wide- ranging response, and we had a very good research backup to the committee, people who came in to do research specifically for the committee, who were very well acquainted with the area, much better than we were. We felt we produced a really pretty competent report.

I think some select committees - this sounds a bit arrogant, doesn't it? - didn't do as good a job as we did, but that's how we felt at the time. Whether or not that was true, we felt there was a good work, not just on our behalf but from a lot of other people in the community, scientific and general public, just being ignored for political expediency. The government said, "Yes, we'll set up a Cabinet committee to examine the recommendations of the parliamentary select committee," which was really just a way of burying the whole project, and I know similar things happened to other select committee recommendations. TAPE FOUR SIDE A ALEXANDER 65

It was an important lesson for us because you spent a lot of time working on this thing, you weren't really sure of its absolute priorities compared, say, to your own electorate work or other things you should be doing in Parliament, but having made the decision to do that, or having agreed to do it, and then put the time in, it was pretty disillusioning to see it all just get ignored.

EH Was this the only committee? Was there any expenditure committee?

ALEXANDER No. Frank Donovan was on the Public Review Expenditure Committee, which subsequently led to his Notre Dame investigations. I got drawn in as a Deputy Speaker in the early days of the government because I suppose I was looking for things to do in Parliament other than just sit on the backbench and get bored during debates. Actually Western Australia's Parliament only meets (at the time it did) for twenty or twenty-one weeks a year. That's actually only sixty sitting days - not very many - and yet they were very long days. They started early and finished late very often - very, very late quite frequently. So you spent a lot of time up there, and because of the back bench status that I had, you didn't get that many opportunities to speak, so you were looking for other areas to spend your time.

When the opportunity for an assistant to the Deputy Speaker came up, I put my hand up and said, "I'd be interested in doing that." That meant that gradually I started to spend more and more time as a chairman of committees or the Deputy Speaker when neither the Speaker or the real deputy was available. Subsequently, in the Dowding Government, I got the job of Deputy Speaker as a result of that, from climbing that particular little hierarchy.

Actually, I found that quite interesting because it meant I learnt more about parliamentary procedures, got to speak to the Clerks of the House - very knowledgable people who otherwise you might not have that interaction with - and got to know a lot more about the parliamentary process and the rights and wrongs of it and the difficulties and advantages of it. When I subsequently did go Independent, that was very handy knowledge to have, actually.

EH Is this a sort of key to unlocking the processes so that you can actually achieve something?

ALEXANDER Yes, maybe, Erica. I think it is in a sense that yes, you then weren't caught out by your lack of knowledge of the parliamentary process, or the system or how it operated day-to-day. My reservation is that again you didn't really have access to.... well you weren't really able to influence the decisions, unless you happen to be in the balance of power as we were at the end of the Lawrence Government term, by which time I was an Independent, but that was just chance, really, that the numbers fell that way. TAPE FOUR SIDE A ALEXANDER 66

As a backbencher, even knowing the parliamentary procedure, the biggest block in your way was not lack of parliamentary knowledge, because once I had that knowledge I still found the biggest block was the executive, still there in control, and I think that's the fundamental weakness of our parliamentary system: that the executive as far too much power and is able to do all sorts of things without parliamentary approval, let alone the approval of their own party.

EH What would need to be changed to shift that balance?

ALEXANDER That's a difficult question, but I think the executive would be bound to bring more things to Parliament for parliamentary discussion, number one - big public works, for example. We were concerned about the freeway in Northbridge, which we've mentioned in previous discussion. Apart from moving a motion against that particular project and hoping that it might get to the top of the Notice Paper for discussion, there was no way that particular project, or any other big capital works project, would necessarily be discussed once it had been approved in global terms in the Budget.

I think big capital works like that, which are likely to be controversial because they affect a lot of people, should have to be debated in Parliament, and I think that's number one. Government departments and ministers would be more accountable to Parliament if that process was followed, I think.

I think, too, the committee system, which was only just starting to develop when I was there and may have been improved since, needs to be broadened a lot. I know now, for example, in the upper House they've got a range of standing committees that weren't in place ten years ago, as they do in the Federal Parliament. That committee system needs to be expanded a lot more so that legislation is properly scrutinised and more things are simply decided by the executive of the moment are also scrutinised in Parliament. I think it needs a complete change of the balance of power between the executive and the Parliament, really, so the Parliament is given the power that it should have, and originally, maybe the proponents of parliamentary democracy imagined it would have. But somehow, gradually, the executive - the Cabinet - really seems to have gotten more and more power and they seem to almost act as a power unto themselves on a lot of matters now.

EH You've expressed a lot of frustration with the system - the committee system, the executive, or even the small group within the executive that controlled the Cabinet. Were you feeling that this was essentially undemocratic?

ALEXANDER Yes. It surprised me, really, because I suppose I knew there were some undemocratic elements within that system but I didn't know how undemocratic it was. I thought that you could open it up more easily than proved possible. I didn't realise.... TAPE FOUR SIDE A ALEXANDER 67

END OF TAPE FOUR SIDE A

TAPE FOUR SIDE B NOT RECORDED TAPE FIVE SIDE A ALEXANDER 68

EH You were saying you hadn't realised the extent....

ALEXANDER No, I hadn't realised the extent of the concentration of power in a few hands. I mean, okay, the Cabinet themselves had been elected - like all of us had - but I think most people from the outside imagine that they were far more answerable to Parliament than they actually are.

EH We finished last time talking about Brian Burke. He resigned in February 1988 - we didn't actually record that. What were the machinations of Peter Downing taking over? Was it just expected that he would, and what was David Parker's situation? [laughs]

ALEXANDER That was a funny period really, in the party history because it was the first time I'd seen a succession of leadership like that, and probably most people in the parliamentary party were in a similar situation (except the old hands) at that stage. Once Burke had flagged his decision to resign - I think it was in January '88, about a month or so before he actually resigned - the powerbrokers in the party started to get together, and I remember phone calls from Jim McGinty collecting together the Left faction of the Parliament and other powerbrokers together, and saying, "Right, lads!" There were a few women, so it wasn't quite right lads, but it seemed that way, "Now's the chance for the left to influence the leadership succession."

In reality, the Left didn't have a candidate in Cabinet who was likely to get elected. I think Ian Taylor may have been the only one there at that stage and he wasn't interested in the leadership at that particular point - he was later. The front runners were Dowding, Parker, and then Bob Pearce put his hand up. I think the Left was a bit divided because none of those people were particularly friendly to the Left faction. Parker, I think, tended to go down the bottom of most people's priority list.

EH Why was that?

ALEXANDER I think he was seen as very closely associated with Burke and WA Inc, and people were starting to realise there were problems there. Pearce was Centre-Left faction, so the Left had some dealings with him and he was obviously ideologically - or apparently - closer to the Left than was Parker, and Dowding was a bit of an unknown quantity. I think he in fact may have even still been in the upper House when I first got elected and he transferred from the Legislative Council down to the Legislative Assembly when the previous member for Maylands, I think it was, the seat he took over, retired. Actually, somebody from the Left, a friend of mine, tried to . . . No, perhaps he was already in the lower House. Yes, I think he was. That must have been in '85 or '86 he made that move. A friend of mine stood for preselection against him because we thought he might be a bit of a shonky operator and we reckoned the Left ought to have more representation in the TAPE FIVE SIDE A ALEXANDER 69

Parliament. She very bravely stood against him - got far more votes than you might have expected but didn't succeed in beating him.

EH Who was that?

ALEXANDER That was Ann McGuire who's married to John, who was a very close sort of political adviser at the time. They were both very heavily involved in the Labor Party then.

Anyway, Dowding had only recently arrived in the lower House so he was still a bit of an unknown quantity in some ways, although most people on the Left tended not to trust him. Burke actually called the Left together and we met - classic Labor Party style - in a Chinese restaurant somewhere south of the river (I can't remember exactly where it was), this sort of clandestine gathering in classic Labor Party terms. Burke walked in after we'd been there about half an hour and sort of said, "Well, what's the Left going to do about this leadership? We've got three candidates haven't we? Parker, he's no good, he talks too much; Pearce, he's no good, he debates too much, and Dowding, oh well, I don't think much of him either - he fucks too much." [laughter] He summed it up beautifully, really. He said, "Well, nonetheless, I think you should go for Peter Dowding."

We all sort of looked at him and said, "Why?" He said, "He's the only one - and we've looked at this very closely - who can get you through the next election. If you want to get re-elected - the Labor Party needs to get re- elected to do all these wonderful things - Peter Dowding's the one who can do it." He made it quite clear that he had no time for him but he thought he had leadership skills and that he would get us through the crisis that was looming. He didn't got into any of the other stuff (he left after about an hour) but he said, "You really should support Dowding."

I think in the end that's what the Left decided to do because Bob Pearce dropped out, as I recall (he realised he didn't have the numbers), and people preferred Dowding to Parker. And many of us half believed what Burke said: that Dowding had the political skills to keep the fortunes of the Labor Party alive. So the Left supported Dowding, and I think in some ways that may have been crucial to the decision of Pearce to drop out. I seem to remember in the end it was.... maybe Parker didn't stand, either, I can't quite remember, but Dowding was the clear winner when it came to the vote in the caucus room, and may not have been, without the support - then I think it was sixteen votes - of the Left in the caucus. So that was one time when I suppose the Left did have some influence on the leadership situation, but it was a very constricted choice and we had none of our own candidates there.

EH Had Carmen Lawrence expressed any interest at that stage?

TAPE FIVE SIDE A ALEXANDER 70

ALEXANDER No, not openly. I do remember a few people saying that she had leadership ambitions and I do remember Burke actually giving her the blessing and saying that she was a future leader for sure when she got elected in '86, about twelve months before I got there. I remember conversations with her - she was a bored backbencher like I was sometimes - "God there's got to be something better than life on the back bench, Ian," and we agreed on that. She made it clear to me from those conversations, although they were not very frequent and tended to be just casual over a drink in the bar late at night when there didn't seem to be much else to do, that she did have future ambitions and they became more open, I think, as Dowding's term went on, and particularly after the '89 election which Dowding managed to pull the Labor Party through - just - then Carmen's ambitions became more open after that.

EH Shall we go on and talk about that '89 election and Peter Dowding's skill as a leader? The emerging public awareness of the crisis of the 1980s was developing?

ALEXANDER It was. During that pre-election year, '88, as gradually the Rothwells saga unfolded and the petrochemical plant project got floated (and a lot of people didn't really believe it was going to happen; they just saw it as the ruse it subsequently turned out to be) there was a lot of disquiet within the caucus. All of that ferment which we talked about in previous years that was under the surface and people worried about, suddenly started to bubble up. Dowding somehow managed to keep the lid on it.

I remember that by this time people like me in the caucus were starting to be a little more vociferous. We'd seen Burke disappear with his wily charms, he wasn't there to stop us talking or incorporate us somehow as he managed to do. Dowding was a more feisty character; he almost encouraged debate because even though he didn't necessarily listen to what you said, I think he wanted people to express their opinions - or we felt that we could. Either way there was more expression of disquiet in the Caucus room about what was happening in government.

Dowding would get up and say things like - I remember saying once something like "Well, how can we continue to deal with people Bond and Connell and all these crooks?" - and he got up and said, "I totally agree with you, Ian, they're all bloody crooks; I don't know what's going on here. We're going to change this", and he'd give you the impression that he was really concerned about it, that he agreed the Labor Party couldn't go on dealing with these crooked people, it was time things were straightened out and we got a new direction. We sort of half believed him, you know. He said it with a bit of a glint in his eye so you weren't quite sure what the story was. [laughs] Parker would say things like, "Well, look, I can't tell you everything behind this Rothwells petrochemical deal but I can tell you this, that it's absolutely essential to our political survival and winning the next election." So you sort of knew that you were almost conniving - even though you didn't know the full facts - with the Cabinet to sort of suppress TAPE FIVE SIDE A ALEXANDER 71 information which, if it got out in the public arena, would be damaging to the party, but you were caught between the thing, "Well, we've got to get on and get ourselves re-elected," and your conscience, which said, "Really this matter ought to be out in the open."

So there was a clear dilemma there and I think in the end most of us buried ourselves back in our electorates and decided we'd just get on and try and get re-elected as best we could, and raise concerns, whenever we got the opportunity, in the caucus room without overdoing it. Somehow Dowding.... 'Smooth Pierre' they called him. He was very smooth with the press, and in the parliamentary arena a very skilful debater, a bit of a head-kicker, which disturbed some of us, but he did seem to win on points in that rather brutal forum, and so he was able to keep one step ahead of the Opposition, even though the Opposition was getting closer and closer, I think, to the real truth behind the WA Inc stuff. Somehow he managed to convince the public as well that the Labor Party was worth giving yet another try, a third term. That, in the circumstances, was an amazing con trick really.

EH David Parker's situation with Yosse Goldberg and the brewery, was the Opposition closing in on that too?

ALEXANDER Well yes they were, but I don't think they'd got the full facts by then. That really seemed to have to wait for the royal commission to bring all of that out, and even when they did raise matters like that as matters of urgency in Parliament, Dowding and Pearce, in particular, were able to sort of hose it down by saying things like, "Well, where's your evidence?" They didn't actually have all that much documentary evidence. They had plenty of hearsay evidence, they may have had other stuff that they weren't prepared to produce at the time, but it didn't appear in the public arena. Journalists, I think, were still sceptical about the whole thing. They knew there was something murky going on but a lot of them either weren't prepared to investigate fully or didn't think it was worthwhile to do so. So there was sort of some support still in the press room for the Labor way of treating the whole thing.

EH Because David Parker was also being linked with the sale of the Fremantle Gas and Coke Company, wasn't he?

ALEXANDER Yes, that's right, and there were various dodgy deals coming out at that time.

EH Do you think in their role as Opposition the Liberal and National Parties were fairly weak?

ALEXANDER Yes, they varied a bit. I think by that time MacKinnon was in the leadership role. He'd taken over from Hassell, and although Hassell had proved ineffective in some ways I think he may have got further with these issues. It seemed to be a little bit beyond the skills of Barry MacKinnon; a very nice guy but he didn't seem all that comfortable TAPE FIVE SIDE A ALEXANDER 72 in a leadership role, and he was not match for Dowding in a parliamentary debate situation, so they were able to get away with a lot that probably they wouldn't have been if Hassell had continued in the leadership role, I suspect.

I understand they had their own internal machinations going on too, which probably didn't help. I think MacKinnon, while he was quite popular at one level, was quite unpopular within his party at another level, so I think they had their own faction fights going that probably debilitated them, too. EH Just following up a bit more on the press, Ian. You mentioned the role of the press - by this time we only had The West Australian here.

ALEXANDER Well that's right. The Western Mail, was it, I think had gone down the gurgler, and there were a few ABC journalists who would occasionally float in from the East, from Four Corners or from The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and other papers which were starting to look at this thing, certainly in more depth than The West was, but they didn't seem to have any immediate impact on the political debate in the West, somehow. I think it was only after '89, when the heat was turned up even more (probably the hurt was as well) that the pressure for a royal commission became so strong at that time. Even though I think the Opposition was calling for a royal commission, nobody took it all that seriously, as a real possibility then. Whenever the topic came up in the caucus room, and that wasn't very often - ie a suggestion for a royal commission - they just said that would just be the death of the government. So again, it was this sort of message that politically our survival depends on somehow keeping this sinking ship above the waterline.

EH And it felt like a sinking ship?

ALEXANDER It started to, I think, in '89-'89. But one thing that helped to secure the Labor Party victory in '89 was the redistribution. I still think, although I've never followed this up in any detail, that the boundaries were. . . . Well, I know that the boundaries were very fortuitous for the Labor Party, and what Burke said to us - because he initiated the redistribution process, as he had to do, when he was still in power in '87 - "Look the Labor Party's boundaries are the only ones which will help secure Labor Party victory at the next election," and they put in a proposed set of boundaries which somehow or other became almost the exact same boundaries that the Electoral Commission - the so-called independent Electoral Commission - adopted.

EH You say "so-called independent"....

ALEXANDER Well, I find it very coincidental that the Labor Party's suggested boundaries and the actual boundaries that were adopted were almost identical. The Labor Party in '89 got elected with a minority of the vote, but it was distributed in such a way geographically that they got just TAPE FIVE SIDE A ALEXANDER 73 the majority of seats. They wouldn't have done that on the previous boundaries. Okay, the previous boundaries did need to be adjusted because of population growth, but I'm not sure that they needed to be adjusted in that particular way. They were disadvantageous to the Liberal and National Parties to a greater extent than fairness demanded, I think.

A couple of us were particularly affected by that redistribution - some more than me as backbenchers because Perth was a safe Labor Party seat on the previous boundaries; it suddenly became a very marginal seat once the boundaries were changed. Now, when I complained about the Labor Party proposal, as a number of other backbenchers did when we were shown this before it went to the Electoral Commission, we said, "Hang on, that makes Perth marginal, it makes Scarborough marginal", it made this seat marginal, it made that seat marginal - several seats around the metropolitan area that had Labor Party representation at that time. You'd think, okay the party would be blatant about wanting its own boundaries within the rules to favour it as much as possible, but they said, "Oh, no, what we're doing is redistributing the safe Labor vote so that we've got the greatest chance of getting backbenchers re-elected, but on a marginal basis."

Now, some of us felt that they were targeting particular individuals - again that might have just been paranoia - who they thought the party could do without. As it turned out, I just scraped back in Perth, only by a few hundred votes. Graham Burkett[?] in Scarborough, who seemed to have a love-hate relationship with the Burke regime, was not re-elected because a whole big territory of Liberal-voting people was put into the Scarborough electorate, for no apparent reason other than it made it a marginal seat. That one seemed to backfire on the Labor Party; they lost that, despite thinking that they could just win it back. That is a story which, I think, could be further researched in the future.

I think all governments have been accused from time to time of manipulating boundaries to their own advantage, but I think in this case I was as close to the process as I'll ever be, I suppose, and there did seem to be something wrong when you knew that the Labor Party's boundaries from an overall point of view weren't quite fair. They did succeeding in re- electing the Labor Party, yes, but I still felt that there was something suspect about them and the way the Labor Party boundaries were adopted by the Electoral Commission without apparent critical analysis.

Now, I'm sure there's more to the story than I know, but I didn't feel very comfortable with a set of boundaries that came from Labor Party head office almost [laughs] - not quite, but almost.

EH The 1989 election campaign - what were the main issues for that campaign?

ALEXANDER I remember the slogan was.... No, I can't remember the slogan now but it was something to do with Peter Dowding and honesty. I TAPE FIVE SIDE A ALEXANDER 74 can't remember the exact wording now but I remember the wags in our office.... That's it! 'Peter Dowding, a future you can believe in' - that became the slogan, and the wags in our office turned it into 'Labor, a future your pet dog can believe in' or something like that. When we faxed a copy through to head office they weren't impressed, but we didn't put it on our stickers.

None of us could really believe in the rhetoric of the election by that time. People were somehow convinced - the majority, just, or just below the majority - that Dowding offered sort of a new direction for the Labor Party. While there might have been some odd stuff happening in the past, Dowding was going to take the party and the State in a new direction, and somehow they based it around this idea of sustainable growth. How quite the petrochemical plant fitted into that, some of us couldn't see, but they promised new industry, eg, the petrochemical plant; they promised a better forest policy than Burke had. Dowding, I think, promised to phase out woodchipping, for example. It never happened, and I think rumour has it that the wording was altered so that instead of it saying "Woodchipping to be phased out by 1999," it said something like "The start of the phase- out will happen in '99," and nobody noticed the change of wording. But the intention was there to offer a new direction in forest policy - more conservation-oriented.

So in a number of areas Dowding made concessions to the environmental lobby, the social welfare lobby - there was greater emphasis on social welfare expenditure promised and social housing, likewise. He was very clever in addressing areas of concern on the Left about the Labor Party drifting to the Right. He appeared to bring the Labor Party back more to a Centre to Left position than Burke had, who was always very sceptical and, certainly in public, about being even seen to be vaguely left wing. Dowding sort of promised a middle road, both to the party and to the electorate. So those became the issues, I think. Although the honesty of the honesty of the government was in question, I think that's what the Opposition tried to target, they somehow didn't succeed in convincing enough people that there were real problems there.

EH Ian, it sounds as if the executive, at least, really believed they could bury people's disquiet about what was happening; that they really thought they could control public opinion, I guess, to that extent.

ALEXANDER Well, yes, and in the short term they were proved correct. The irony is that all of those things that were happening during '88 around Rothwells and the petrochemical plant (I think it was the second rescue of Rothwells by that time) didn't get scrutinised closely enough for the concerns to really come to the surface. I think they did an amazingly good PR job, really, and the spin doctors had never been so busy as they must have been during '88, sort of papering over the cracks and burying, as you say, the real stories and somehow allaying people's concerns and saying, "It's okay, it's okay." Because the leadership had changed, you see, Dowding was able to argue, "Well that's behind us TAPE FIVE SIDE A ALEXANDER 75 now. There might have been some funny things happening under Burke, but you can trust Dowding." Somehow he managed to get people to believe that.

His personal style in the caucus was, as I said, a bit confrontationist and almost intimidatory. I remember making remarks during '88 at electorate council meetings critical of government decisions (because they were still making decisions which were at odds with party policy quite frequently), and these being reported back to Peter Dowding, and he would haul you in, almost like a naughty schoolboy. I remember being called up to his office in the Capita centre once and he drew a circle on the board and he said, "This is the circle of consensus in the Labor Party," and he drew a little slice, like a pie, and he said, "This is the conflict slice." He said, "Why are you always in there? Why aren't you in the consensus bit? Why are you always in the conflict bit?" He was saying to me, "Why are you always criticising government decisions?" I said, "Well, that's just the way I see it," and explained that I thought a number of decisions were against party policy et cetera, et cetera, and I think we were debating the future of guards on the electric trains at the time, which had been introduced.

[break in recording]

EH You were in the office at the Capita centre, and conflict and guards on the electric trains.

ALEXANDER Yes. He was taking the view, and the Cabinet was taking the view, that guards on the new train system, which was just starting to be introduced at that time, should be phased out. Now there was disquiet amongst the public about that for obvious reasons, and amongst the guards themselves who stood to lose their jobs. They were mostly members of a union which was very loyal to the Labor Party, the old Australian Railways Union. So that was the issue at stake at that particular time and we - we, meaning the Left - and a number of other people were fighting to have that decision reversed, so I was fairly critical of the decision in party forums. He said, "It's not your job to criticise those decisions. Your job as a backbencher is to back up the decision of the executive."

We had a long argument about that: "Well, if the executive made the decision in conjunction with the caucus that might be fair enough, but since the Executive makes the decision and then gives it to a reluctant caucus to sell, I can't accept that." He said, "Look, remember this, wherever you go, wherever you are, I will have someone listening to you and reporting back to me just what you've said." I thought, "God, this is really getting out of hand." But that was the sort of threatening tactic that he would use to try and intimidate people who would say that they would continue to prosecute causes they believed in. At that stage I was fairly mild on that particular issue in public. On others I may not have been but on that one I kept my comments to a minimum and tried to fight the issue TAPE FIVE SIDE A ALEXANDER 76 within party forums, but he believed, or tried to convince me as a backbencher to believe that my mission was to be his apostle, rather than a representative of party policy or public concern.

I didn't take it all that seriously, although from time to time, given our earlier conversation about people listening in and taping and so on, I did start to get a little bit worried about what I should say to whom and when. He had a very overbearing leadership style if it was necessary to achieve his ends, I think.

EH You were surprised, in a way, that Labor got back in '89?

ALEXANDER Yes. Well, it was on the card that they might lose because of all these doubts about Labor's credibility and because of the marginal nature of the seats that many of us were contesting. Perth, as I say, had suddenly become marginal because all of Mt Lawley and Menora, particularly Menora and Coolbinia which are very heavily weighted towards the conservative vote usually, had come into the Perth electorate, and that made it a pretty marginal proposition. Although the pundits in the party thought we were likely to win, we were very nervous. Everybody in our campaign team realised that it was going to be very difficult because we did a lot of doorknocking and got a fairly mixed response in those marginal areas. We scraped back, as a number of other people on the campaign trail did, but the Labor Party only just got enough seats to form a government.

I remember Dowding ringing up on election night and saying, "Are you going to win?" I said, "I don't know at this stage," this was about ten o'clock at night, "but the scrutineers say we might just scrape through." He said, "Well, if you don't win, the Labor Party doesn't win." So at that point Perth had become a pivotal seat, and about an hour later it was clear that Perth would just fall to Labor. I think the Labor Party margin was something like three or four seats, but it was very narrow in the end.

END OF TAPE 5 SIDE A TAPE FIVE SIDE B ALEXANDER 77

EH A further interview with Ian Alexander, recorded as his home on 25th September 1998.

EH Ian, we finished with the 1989 election last time we met, and today I would like to ask you the first question surrounding the issues of Peter Dowding and David Parker as Premier and Deputy Premier, and really the struggles they had holding the government together as the Opposition, the press and the public became more aware of, well, the corruption almost of the 1980s.

ALEXANDER Yes, and the party itself became more aware of what was happening too, I think, and that increased pressure internally. I seem to remember that at the time Dowding came to power - when Burke endorsed him, the thing we were talking about last time - the word around the traps was that he was just recruited really to get Labor through the election. There was always a feeling, anyway, that he was a temporary Premier in the sense that he had the skills to get the party through the election and convince the electorate that everything was okay, but it became obvious very soon after the election, as you said, that people had been fooled, or they didn't have the proper information to make the judgment on, and as Laurie Connell and company got into more and more trouble with further Rothwells' rescues and so on, and the petrochemical plant which had been suspected as a furphy, it became obvious that it was a furphy and just a way to distract attention from the real problems.

Dowding was increasingly stressed himself. I remember in caucus meetings people raising questions like, "What the hell's going on?", and he would more or less say "Well, I don't know." He didn't know the depth of the problems that he'd taken charge of, really.

EH Do you think that was genuine or were you suspicious?

ALEXANDER It was hard to tell. We were a bit suspicious because of his rather smooth nature. He would tend to gloss over the truth if he could, I think, in a difficult situation. Yes, we weren't sure. I think they were themselves discovering the real depth of the problems but they were probably revealing far less to us than we should have known. At the same time, discontent was growing in the party over Parker and Dowding's handling of the issues. Then rumours started about a leadership challenge, I think towards the end of 1990. I remember Jim McGinty (as usual, the numbers' man) phoning around while Peter Dowding away and getting the Left in this case together. The idea was that while Dowding was away, you know, the old Roman emperor trick: stab him in the back while he was away. Because they said confidence in him was decreasing, the calls for a royal commission were getting stronger and stronger, both from the Parliament and the public and from the People for Fair and Open Government, that you mentioned. So there was a lot of pressure on the party, and the government, and people felt that a leadership change might help stave off a royal commission by installing somebody that wasn't in any way directly associated with WA TAPE FIVE SIDE B ALEXANDER 78

Inc, whereas Peter Dowding, skilful politician though he proved, was clearly implicated in some of the earlier decisions because he'd been in the Cabinet at the time.

I think by the time Dowding got back.... he'd gone to Sweden, as he often did, looking for inspiration, I guess, and I think he was away two weeks and by the time he got back they had hoped to have a majority of caucus sign a petition saying "We want you out". I think they only got about twenty-something signatures - not a majority, but still a substantial number. There was a lot of discussion in the Left about the wisdom of that, and a number of us felt that although we had no time for Dowding at all by then because he'd treated people very badly, really: he'd made an attempt to be open but hadn't really been open; he'd been very dictatorial in his approach on a number of issues, so he'd made a lot of enemies right across the party. Nonetheless, a number of people felt that the proper time to do it was when he got back and raise the matter semi- democratically, in the caucus room. I was one of those who felt that despite his carry-on that he really should be given a chance to defend himself.

It turned out that when he got back, I think McGinty and maybe Ian Taylor confronted him as he got off the plane and said, "We've got all these signatures. It's not enough, but it's pretty close to enough, to turf you out", and of course he was furious with that and immediately called a caucus meeting, but by the time he did, it was obvious that he was on the skids as far as the Caucus was concerned, that he didn't have the support of the majority, and that's when the alternative candidates started putting their hands up, of whom Carmen Lawrence was the leader.... well, became the leader, but she was the leading candidate and she was supported by the Left after.... I think we had thoughts of other possible candidates. I can't remember if Bob Pearce again put his name forward, but there were a couple of other possible contenders. The immediate question was: Who should replace Dowding?

Carmen Lawrence managed to convince the Left and the other factions - she was of the Centre so she was getting support from there anyway - and the Right, that she was the best candidate because she argued she would give the party a fresh start, put all this behind us, don't worry things will be different - all the complaints we had about the caucus decision- making procedures and the party policy being overturned constantly, she said, "Yes, I'm aware of all those criticisms," and she was because she'd been part of the backbench herself until she was put in the Cabinet a few years before that. So she promised a fresh start.

A few people said at the time that we were again being taken in by false promises, but it seemed to me she was genuine in her approach at that time and she did want to do things differently. So she became the frontrunner and was elected at a caucus meeting. Then the question was: what should happen to David Parker, who hung on initially, as Deputy Premier. I remember him coming into a caucus meeting or it may TAPE FIVE SIDE B ALEXANDER 79 have been a Left caucus meeting and saying, "Look, I might be responsible for losing all of this government money; there's this, there's this, there's this, there's this; but if you actually look at the money I've helped the government make, there's this, there's this...." He had a balance sheet and he said, "I've actually made more money for the government than we've lost." It was an extraordinary proposition, really, because there were all sorts of other factors that might come into whether he should retain his deputy leadership or not. He was desperate by that time and it wasn't long afterwards that he was replaced as well.

At that time the Left put forward, I think, Ian Taylor as the deputy candidate. I think at one time I actually put my own hat into the ring for deputy, knowing that I didn't have a chance of getting elected. This was actually before Parker was replaced the first time, before he was replaced finally, I mean. The first time he was before the caucus, as it were, because I felt, and a small number of the Left felt (I think it was six or seven in number) that really the deputy leadership should be contested because we felt if Dowding was going to go, Parker should go as well. Anyway I got six or seven votes and the token gesture was made, but eventually Parker did step down, under pressure, voluntarily, and was replaced by Ian Taylor.

That was sort of factional manoeuvring as well, because Ian Taylor was, nominally at least, a member of the Left. Initially the Left was going to support Parker remaining as deputy (at least the majority of them were) but it became obvious that that was an untenable position so they pushed Taylor in to replace him. But all of that is just really personalities and typical sort of leadership politics. I think the underlying thing was that when Carmen came in she did appear, because she was the first woman Premier and a lot of people had very high hopes for her, as somebody with a new broom, as it were, who was able to set the party on a new course. But that didn't last for long, really, before it became obvious that a royal commission was the only way for the government eventually to stop the party, and the government, haemorrhaging to death over the WA Inc issue, which just become bigger, and bigger, and bigger.

Despite Carmen's best efforts to set the government on a different course, it was all there and something needed to be done to investigate it. So she started to push, as I understand it, from her own position, for a royal commission, and apparently was blocked every time by the majority of Cabinet, but in the end decided one weekend that she was going to call a royal commission anyway, and she sort of did it by executive authority, I think, without initially consulting Cabinet, and then went in and told Cabinet what she was doing and what she'd done.

I remember a phone call from one of the Cabinet ministers - Yvonne Henderson, I think it was - ringing around just to warn people that this was happening. I said, "That's fantastic news, best news for a long time." She said, "What do you mean, Ian?" I said, "Well, maybe finally the TAPE FIVE SIDE B ALEXANDER 80 wrongdoers will be brought to justice," as it were, and she said "Oh no, you don't know the half of it. This will be the end of the Labor Party."

That was the way a lot of people viewed it. That was why they'd resisted it. They recognised there were serious problems and corruption but they thought the whole party would be brought down by this, and I guess it was for a while. I felt that even so, the party had to face the music because its leadership had been up to its neck in all of these deals and the fact that a big majority of ordinary party members had had nothing to do with it was unfortunate, but I think most people in the grass roots of the party by that time felt, like Carmen did, that an investigation had to be undertaken.

EH Were you sympathetic towards Carmen Lawrence's position? What's your assessment of her?

ALEXANDER Well, at that time I was, very much so, and I felt that she was doing her best to break through all the hypocrisy that had, up until then, really accompanied WA Inc; that people knew things were going wrong, but on the other hand said, "Oh well, the less we know the better." So I was very supportive of her approach on that, and I think she showed a lot of strength and that the promise of a new direction was definitely fulfilled by that action, but on a number of other issues I think she didn't quite get to the same position. An example of that, I think, was the juvenile justice issue. I think it happened while she was away - funny how many things happen while you're away when you're leader! There was a call for tougher action on law and order; public rallies were being held; crime statistics were allegedly going up rapidly, and so on, and it was the start of the nineties concern over crime in the community and the backlash was coming from the hardliners. A number of people in the Cabinet and in the caucus supported the idea of Labor getting tough on crime, but it was a very divisive issue because a lot of people resisted that call and said we should look at the causes of crime rather than the penalties; the same debate that's still going now, with no further progress, really.

At the time Carmen, in principle, supported the position of, "No, we've got to look at the causes and we've got to go easy when it comes to tougher penalties. We don't want to be seen to be just opportunist on this issue." But while she was away and while Ian Taylor was Acting Premier, the Cabinet took a decision to do just that, to bring down the tougher legislation on juvenile issues, particularly the three strikes and you're out legislation, for gaoling of youngsters involved in criminal activity. When Carmen came back, it seems for whatever reason she didn't have the gumption or the political nous to say, "This decision was taken while I was away. I'm going to overturn it, just as I did with the royal commission." She caved in. She accepted the decision and then was very uncomfortable for months afterwards defending it in the Parliament, and when the legislation finally came through she clearly was of the opinion that it shouldn't have been like this but she had to defend it because she was in the leadership position. TAPE FIVE SIDE B ALEXANDER 81

I mean she'd been undermined by the fact they'd taken the decision while she was away (and I'm sure that was deliberate) but I, and a number of others, felt that she could have had it reversed if she'd appealed to the wider party and the caucus; we could have had that decision recommitted, as it were. So her hard line approach in the end disappointed a number of people in the welfare field and social work and so on, who, up to that point, had invested a lot of faith in her approach.

On the Notre Dame issue too, I think she felt because she'd been Education Minister at the time that she sort of had to defend the decision, which was actually taken by David Parker, I believe, before the '89 election to approve the land grant for Notre Dame which proved so disastrous, politically and financially, in subsequent years. Somehow she felt that that was a legitimate decision, and yet there was widespread feeling in the party and the community and elsewhere that it was a very partisan decision.

So there were a few things like that - and it's easy from the backbench, I suppose, to criticise the new Premier - which started to sow doubts in the mind over her leadership qualities and her ability to face up to things in that tight situation.

Another was the way in which, eventually, the Cabinet was reshuffled. She made it clear when she came in - and there was all this jockeying for position from the backbench, you know, the "me next" idea from all factions - that she would reshuffle the Cabinet and give the Left, in particular, who felt they'd been disadvantaged by only having one or two Cabinet ministers up to that point, a fairer say or a bigger number in Cabinet (which was seen as the same thing). Eventually the Cabinet reshuffle came. The trouble was that good people, including Pam Buchanan from the Left, who'd made it into Cabinet finally in '89 or '90, I think, over protest from Peter Dowding, even though she was a former colleague of his (but she did finally make it - she became the third Left member in the Cabinet) she was pushed out and Jim McGinty was brought in, and Gavan Troy was also pushed out, as was Jeff Carr.

I had no axe to grind with either of those people. I'd found that both Gavan Troy and Jeff Carr had been pretty fair in their dealings with me as a backbencher, despite the fact we were in different factions, and Pam Buchanan, being from the Left.... well, most of the Left thought she was doing a really good job. Her heart was in the right place, particularly on Aboriginal issues, like the brewery; she was trying to have the whole thing reconsidered and she was pushing against formidable odds, and we felt she was very unfairly treated by being pushed out. At the same time, Jim McGinty, the leader of the Left, sort of somehow magically took her position, and he was the one who was supposed to be standing for justice and he knifed one of his own colleagues in the back - or allowed Carmen to do that. So there was a lot of ill-feeling over that reshuffle. Emergency TAPE FIVE SIDE B ALEXANDER 82 meetings were held, people were very upset by the whole procedure. It was contested in the caucus room unsuccessfully.

Eventually Carmen's reshuffle did fall into place, but Pam Buchanan by that time (and she was very sick anyway) had decided to resign and sit on the crossbenches as an Independent. She started the movement which eventually Frank and I followed. By that time I'd really, I suppose, lost a lot of faith in Carmen's ability to successfully lead the party, which was, of course, in turmoil. I mean, probably she was given an impossible job. I don't think anybody would have been really successful in leading the party through such a difficult time. So I ended up having mixed feelings: that she'd tried to do some things but she'd been overwhelmed by big odds, and under pressure I think she'd made some very bad decisions along the way and given some indications to me that she might have been slightly less than honest under pressure on some issues like Notre Dame and the Western Women financial issue.

There were a number of like issues where, because the numbers were getting closer in the Parliament, the Opposition was putting more and more pressure on and there were more and more censure motions brought up. I ended up feeling whoever was leading the party it was the wrong place to be - the parliamentary party.

EH If we go back to the royal commission and the mounting pressure for the royal commission we talked about, there was also Bevan Lawrence, Carmen's brother, who was the leader for the movement of Fair and Open Government. What did you think of that?

ALEXANDER Well, that was a topic of great discussion in the party, as you can imagine, being brother and sister, and of course in the wider press and so on it was constantly in the news. None of us knew Bevan particularly well. We'd heard him speak at rallies and so on, so there was a natural suspicion because he was opposing his sister, but on the other hand he was voicing the doubts which probably she shared at the time, so she was in a particularly difficult position as well, I guess. There was a suspicion that it was just Bevan on behalf of the Liberals. I mean, even if he wasn't card-carrying Liberal, as it were, he was certainly sympathetic to the Liberal cause, and still is, I think (that was well known), but on the other hand he was voicing doubts which a lot of people harboured themselves. So there was antipathy on the one hand, but paradoxically, sympathy on the other for his leading of that mission for Fair and Open Government.

I must say since I've been extremely disappointed with Fair and Open Government because I reckon they've got a lot to investigate right now, but that's another issue.

EH It lost momentum, didn't it, after they got they got the royal commission.

TAPE FIVE SIDE B ALEXANDER 83

ALEXANDER Yes, that's right, and I think, in a sense, that showed it up for what it was. A lot of people in Fair and Open Government were really not so much concerned with the principle but they just wanted to get rid of Labor and that was it. They wanted to get rid of Labor anyway and WA Inc was another excuse to do that. I think that element was at play. Whether it was part of Bevan Lawrence's strategy, I don't know, but I know there were people drawn into that movement who were very hard- core conservatives.

EH The setting up of the royal commission and the playing out of it, how did you assess that?

ALEXANDER I remember feeling initially the terms of reference might have been slightly narrowly drawn, but I think under pressure in Parliament they were broadened and in the end they were certainly broad enough to cover most things, except that from my perspective, I felt they should have been widened to cover the Perth City Council as well, for obvious reasons: the links that we've talked about previously, and the material that I'd collected together showed that there were, at the least, some suspicious links between dealings of people in and around the city council in the eighties and the bigger WA Inc players.

EH Were you able to communicate that?

ALEXANDER Not effectively. I did eventually send some material to the royal commission itself, which they talked to me about, but they felt it was outside their terms of reference, number one, and number two, my evidence was hearsay rather than documentary evidence (that's what I thought they should have got) but they felt it was just outside of their charter, basically. I remember speaking to one of the commission's lawyers about that, and while they were sympathetic they felt they couldn't take it any further.

In the Parliament the Liberal Party was sort of sympathetic to what I was saying but it was only certain Liberal Party frontbenchers I noticed that gave me real support, so there was some division of opinion within the Liberal Party - presumably to do with their links with former Perth city councillors themselves - that made them a little bit reluctant to push this particular point too, because remember they'd opposed my initial criticism of the council, and while some of them came around to the point of view that the council should be included, it was never enough of them to make it a possibility that that would happen because the government itself resisted that, again, for obvious reasons that their own members and former members of Parliament, et cetera had links with that city council growth coalition group.

EH The Liberal Party was obviously putting on a lot of pressure, but were they showing any concerns as well, like the ones you've alluded to?

TAPE FIVE SIDE B ALEXANDER 84

ALEXANDER Well that was the only one that I really became aware of because I took up the issue myself. I mean, in casual conversation they were fairly guarded and I didn't know any of the Liberals well enough, really, to know what was going on inside their party rooms.

EH And your assessment of the role of the press, Ian - the role of the investigative journalism, I guess, is the question. How on-the- ball were they?

ALEXANDER I think not very, with some very notable exceptions. There were a couple of people from the Sunday Times who pushed and pushed and pushed, and many eastern States journalists seemed to more willing to pursue the matter periodically than our local press did, but once The Western Mail closed down there was no dissident voice. The West itself eventually started to do some digging, but for a long, long time.... well, rumour had it that they were under editorial instruction not to pursue the matter too vigorously and just to report what the Opposition said, but not to undertake much in the way of investigations themselves.

Janet Wainwright I think at the time was with The West, and I think that may have been one of the reasons she switched to the Sunday Times; that she knew a lot more than she was able to say while she was with The West. That's one example of a dedicated journalist who knew more than a lot of us did about what was going on and what needed to be investigated but who was unable to bring that into the public arena. So I think there was a lot of that editorial pressure on journalists not to investigate it or to get on with other things.

EH Where was that pressure coming from?

ALEXANDER I would guess the board of the paper, but I don't really know. That would make an interesting story in itself. There were certainly some directors of The West - maybe not at the time the royal commission was announced - who had been there in the eighties who were also members of the Curtin Foundation, so I think there were links there which some people were nervous of being uncovered.

EH Because they were investigating Western Australian heroes like Bond and Connell in so many ways, weren't they.

ALEXANDER That's right. Of course, Bond owned The West Australian newspaper for some of that period, didn't he; and so that certainly dented their enthusiasm for the truth, on account of Bond himself. And you're right, he was just one of many figures like that that were involved who also were in such powerful positions that they were almost in a position to stymie the processes of the royal commission - or certainly they helped delay the setting up of it, I believe. If they'd been a better investigative paper or pursued the matter more vigorously, I reckon the royal commission would have been announced probably a year before it actually was, if not even sooner. TAPE FIVE SIDE B ALEXANDER 85

EH You've expressed growing disenchantment once the royal commission was called, and then leading to going Independent. Was it a gradual decision? You mentioned that Pam Buchanan was a trigger in some ways. How did the decision to do this evolve? Did it evolve or....?

ALEXANDER It did evolve through my own sort of thinking it through, constant discussion - not so much with parliamentary colleagues but with my support group outside of the party. Parliamentary colleagues up to a point, because I knew Frank Donovan, for example, was of a similar mind; we often swapped notes on these things. I suppose we were playing our own little games to some extent, or thought we were. I remember sitting down in a cafe in Mt Lawley once with Frank Donovan and John McGuire and a trusty little group - Barbara Cutler and Cathy Anderson from the office....

EH This is the support group?

ALEXANDER Yes, that's the core of the support group.

EH Right. So your electorate officer and Frank Donovan?

ALEXANDER And John McGuire, who was sort of campaign manager and sort of chief adviser. We fantasised.... I think this was even before Pam Buchanan had announced her decision to go Independent; the parliamentary numbers had changed somehow, there must have been a couple of by-elections which reduced the majority of the government, and we said, "All it would take would be three of us to go Independent and we would hold the balance of power." Then we said, ha ha ha, but there was some serious intent behind those words. [laughs]

EH Sowed the seeds?

ALEXANDER And that's how it turned out in the end. So we were sort of pretending to be.... well, I don't know if we were. It was sort of a mixture of serious and make believe sort of stuff, because we felt that we didn't really want to sever our links with the party altogether, but we wanted to be a more independent voice in the Parliament because our attempts to raise these issues within the party were clearly falling on largely deaf ears.

END OF TAPE 5 SIDE B TAPE SIX SIDE A ALEXANDER 86

ALEXANDER Yes, so we thought that we'd have more opportunity to be honest to our constituency, on local and Statewide issues, if we were more independent. The Caucus system, really, I think when it was set up perhaps in the 1890s or early twentieth century it might have been valid to bind the caucus to the decisions of the majority, but if the decisions of the majority were not made democratically, then to me the whole rationale for that system of having to support the caucus or you're out of the party, collapses. I think more and more in the time that I was there it became obvious that whoever was leader - whether it was Burke or Dowding or Lawrence - whatever they said about good intent, in the majority of cases of contentious decisions they were taken by the Cabinet with no reference to the caucus or the wider party. They were taken on all sorts of reasons other than philosophical ones, and they constantly broke commitments and planks of the party platform.

There seemed no way to stop that; it seemed to be endemic to the system, but we figured that a small ginger group in the Parliament, still committed to the principles of the Labor Party but openly contesting the Cabinet rather than having to do it behind closed doors in the caucus room and constantly losing because we didn't have the numbers, might be a more preferable approach. I suppose, eventually, that's what we tried, although we didn't really.... We sort of planned it, but also events just unfolded that way, and then I think the reshuffling of the Cabinet and Pam Buchanan's decision showed also - the way she was treated in particular, after a year of very good principled service in the Ministry - that individuals didn't matter. It was a graphic illustration of the fact that people just get pushed aside - which we knew anyway, but it crystallised our feelings on that - regardless; that ambition took over, personal ambition, and so on. So that was very disillusioning to know that even under a new leadership, and even with a commitment to do things more openly, somehow still the same thing happened and good people got pushed aside for no apparent reason other than personal ambition.

Then after that, I started thinking very actively about going Independent, and so did Frank. Then eventually the matter got into the public arena and somehow that sort of became an object of press attention (against our intentions) and eventually I made the decision, and Frank likewise a few months later.

Most of the people in that support group that I mentioned were not entirely convinced that it was a good idea but once I'd made the decision were very supportive of it.

EH This was in March of '91?

ALEXANDER Yes, when eventually I made that decision. We chose Labour Day which, as far as the real party faithful were concerned, was an act of almost treachery, but symbolically it just happened to be around the time and so I thought, "Well, if we're going to do something symbolic we might as well do it on a symbolic day." It made a much bigger impact, TAPE SIX SIDE A ALEXANDER 87 as far as the publicity was concerned, than I'd expected, I suppose because it sort of crystallised the feelings of a lot of people of things that were wrong with the parliamentary party.

EH What sort of support and who did you get it from?

ALEXANDER Unexpected areas, really. A lot of people outside of the party were very strongly supportive, and a lot of people who'd left the party previously, for similar reasons that I did, said, "Yeah, well there you go." It reflected their feelings as well. On the other hand, people within the party were far less supportive - I suppose as you would expect. They argued, and probably continue to argue, that this was the wrong way to do things; that if you're discontent with the way the Labor Party's going, you've got to fight it from within, but by that time I felt that there was no prospect of changing anything from within and it was the only way to go.

EH Was there any suspicion that this is what you were going to do? Did you flag it at all within the party?

ALEXANDER Occasionally at caucus or executive meetings, but nobody really took it that seriously. A couple of journos picked it up and I just said, "Well it's something that's occurred to me from time to time." Then I think in the week before I made the decision, Frank and I met several times and, as I say, I think the press got on to that, so it became a sort of a guessing game as far as a few individual journalists were concerned, but it didn't attract a huge amount of attention until the decision was made.

EH So Carmen Lawrence didn't try to change your mind or anything like that? Or Jim McGinty?

ALEXANDER Well yes, I think she did as a result of that publicity. I'd forgotten that. Yes, I think she actually set up a meeting and tried to persuade me not to go Independent, yes. I think at the time she was under pressure by a whole lot of other things and my potential resignation was only one of a huge number of issues she had to deal with. And I remember the conversation as not being all that satisfactory. I think in the end she left the decision in my hands. She said, "Well, if you've got to do it, you've got to do it," sort of thing, "but I don't want you to and you shouldn't." Of course, once I made the decision she was very, very critical and said, "Oh well, it won't make any difference." She got very defensive, as you might expect, that those that were left were going to defend their position even more strongly.

I tied my resignation not just to the broader issues of party leadership and breaking of principle and matters like Notre Dame, but also to local issues which a number of us felt we hadn't been listened to sufficiently. Local issues like the East Perth redevelopment, which was right in the heart of the Perth electorate, which was government-driven but was really going in a direction quite contrary to the original intent of the plan. The same with TAPE SIX SIDE A ALEXANDER 88 the proposed city northern bypass. They seemed to be wanting to push ahead with it, even though there was a huge amount of local opposition. Well eventually they did back off that, but that was only after I went Independent. So there were a number of local and broader issues which sort of went together to make up the reasons why I eventually decided to go that way.

EH The question of regrets by going Independent - of course you were giving up any opportunity for political advancement and Cabinet positions or even more. Had you decided definitely on whether you would stay in politics or were you just going to....

ALEXANDER I wasn't sure. At the time that I made the decision to go Independent I thought I might continue to go further with politics but I wasn't sure. I was having serious doubts about whether I did want to stay in politics, but I thought if I did I want to do it in a different way, and the Independent way seemed to be more promising. On the question of Cabinet posts, I think by that time I'd realised two things: first, I wasn't very high up in the queue so I would have to wait years, probably, for that to be a real prospect and, secondly, I wasn't sure that I really wanted to be, by that time, part of a Cabinet which was operating in this sort of dictatorial top-down way. I couldn't see that one or two changes in the Cabinet would make any difference; it hadn't in all the time I'd been there, to the way it really operated, collectively. I felt it was time to perhaps revert to my former modus operandi and fight things in a different way and try to get change more openly rather than working within what was turning out to be a very closed system, and even though I left at a time when a lot of people in the Left were saying, "There's signs of change from within and we still can change things," and a lot of people in that position got very angry with me for my decision to quit (they felt I was disloyal, so I lost some allies and friends in that process) it seemed from the support I got in the wider community, I felt my decision had been vindicated because it enabled a lot of people who had either left the party or stopped supporting it for very similar reasons to mine to say, "Ah yes, that crystallises our discontent."

It became clear fairly quickly that right across the political spectrum.... of course the Liberals tried to take advantage of it, you know, "Here's one of the Labor Party people crossing the floor. Good on you Ian!" They were trying to incorporate me - so I was wary of that - but there were some others who were less opportunistic within the Liberal Party who sincerely expressed their support, because they actually had similar doubts about being part of the Liberal Party system. Ian Thompson was one of those, who eventually decided to go Independent himself. So there were people in similar positions across the political divide who saw the possibility of not so much a coalition but a group of Independents somehow altering the processes of the way in which the executive and the Parliament interacted. It was starting to happen in other States of Australia at the time, so right across the country there was a move in this direction and Independents were either being elected or appearing from within the TAPE SIX SIDE A ALEXANDER 89

Parliament like us and putting pressure on the executive to be a little bit more accountable.

EH Did you actually hold the balance of power at any stage?

ALEXANDER We did in the end. Unfortunately Pam Buchanan died a few months after she went Independent. It was a very tragic story and we felt that the processes she'd been forced to go through didn't do anything for her health at all. She, I think, was replaced by.... now was she replaced by a Labor or a Liberal? I think she was replaced by another Labor member, Fred Riebeling. What happened was.... I might have got the individuals slightly wrong but the mathematics were that by the time Ian Thompson, Frank Donovan and I had gone Independent, Pam Buchanan was replaced by an ALP person, so that means there was one less Independent. Then Liz Constable was elected as an independent Liberal at a by-election in 1991. So if 3 of the 4 Independents voted together, with the Liberal Party, we had the majority of one over the government, but the occasions on which three Independents voted together were very few, because we weren't a coalition, we were just a group of Independents and there was a political difference.

Oddly enough, usually when Frank and I supported the government, Ian Thompson would support the Liberal Party, and vice versa. We felt Ian Thompson started to play games himself - whether he did or not is something that he'd have to answer, I think - but there were very few occasions when the three Independents voted together against the government with the Liberal Party.

EH Do you recall an example?

ALEXANDER Yes, there was one. It was to do with the brewery issue, which was in the news at that time and was another issue which I'd had very strong doubts about, not quite from the time I was elected but very shortly afterwards - once I found out about the full extent of the Aboriginal issues involved and so on. I had very strong doubts about that development going ahead - and it was a WA Inc saga, as well.

EH Yes, we alluded to that last time - between Yosse Goldberg and the Fremantle Gas and Coke Company. I think he was able to buy it at a bargain basement price.

ALEXANDER Yes, it was a bit of a scam, and then eventually it got leased to Multiplex and John Roberts' crew. So when a motion came through from the upper House calling for the brewery development to be stopped and for the brewery to be demolished, we all supported it. Ian Thompson had been a long-time opponent of the particular proposal that came forward, and Frank and I both voted with the Liberal Party against the government and so the motion got through. But it was only a motion; it just called on the government to abandon the project, and they could and TAPE SIX SIDE A ALEXANDER 90 did ignore it. By the time a more hardline piece of legislation came through actually requiring the government to stop the development.... that was initially going to be ruled out on technical grounds but we managed to get around that, but when the vote came, Ian Thompson crossed the floor and voted with the government and he explained it by saying he'd been approached by the government and the developers and he'd been convinced that the development was in the public interest and he'd changed his mind.

So, we never quite found out why and weren't convinced by his public explanation, but that was one occasion when we could have actually stopped the government in its tracks on a very important issue and yet somehow that little Independent group fell apart.

The only other occasion that I remember when we successful, there were a few amendments we got through on the East Perth legislation and a few other matters of concern to me, which was good, but major matters, I think there was the issue of a bridge over the railway. It really wasn't a major matter; it was a major matter in the Perth electorate, but not beyond that. All four of us voted against the government to stop an additional bridge going across the railway in the Northbridge area. So from a town planning design point of view, it was quite an important victory I felt at the time, but it wasn't anything that fundamentally affected the progress of the State, I don't think.

EH How did your electorate react, because that's often how the press portrays it - you've betrayed your electorate?

ALEXANDER Well, I suppose some people did argue that in the Labor Party, but I remember visiting them at branches of the Labor Party after I'd taken my decision in Highgate, Mt Lawley and Perth, and I got a very frosty reception from some people, very frosty indeed. In fact in some cases they didn't want me to come and talk to them, but the majority of them were at least interested to hear why I made the decision. And having heard that, a lot of individuals approached me afterwards - party members - and said they fully understood and would have done the same thing in my circumstances.

We were already on a fundraising drive for the '93 election by that time so I made sure that I paid back all of that money to the party so I couldn't be accused of financially gaining from the decision if I was going to stand again - so it was expensive, but I think it was the right thing to do. I think that helped to smooth over the criticism but it didn't get rid of it, certainly, and a number of party members remained - and probably some still do, even years later - angry about it, because they thought I'd undermined Labor's chances of retaining the seat, whether I stood or I didn't, at the next election. So they thought, yes, I'd definitely done the wrong thing. But in the wider community there appeared to be a great deal of support because across the political spectrum people were looking for politicians to stand up and be counted at that time, as it were, to say, "Well, yes, the TAPE SIX SIDE A ALEXANDER 91 processes are rotten, things are going wrong, there's got to be a new way or a different way of doing things." So because of the principles I supported, I suppose, that got wider community support - not overwhelming but certainly quite strong.

EH Enough support to really make you believe that you'd done the right thing?

ALEXANDER Yes, it definitely vindicated the decision from the feedback we were getting in the office. There was a strong dissident minority criticising me - and I was aware of that; most of those were party or union people who felt that this was a bad decision - but there were sufficient people within the Left of the Labor Party and in the Left movement more generally, who were very supportive, including some party stalwarts and some parliamentarians who wouldn't go public but privately gave me very strong support. So it was enough to keep the morale reasonably high amongst our group.

We actually did a poll the following year, I think, when the question of whether I'd stand for re-election came up. It was only a sample poll by phone of a few hundred people but it was reasonably carefully constructed to be representative, and that showed a reasonable level of support. It predicted something like 35 per cent of the primary vote.

EH That's very high.

ALEXANDER It would have been very high, but whether that would have really translated twelve months later when all the fuss had died down and I was just another politician again, we weren't sure, but it was promising, and I knew that if I stood for re-election I had at least a fair chance; it may not have been enough to get me across the line but it appeared to be a fair chance. By and large the press were very sympathetic - not all together; I had some very hostile journalists, including Alan Carpenter from The 7.30 Report. He's now a member of Parliament himself. I remember him being very, very critical but by and large journalists were not hostile and I think because I became part of that balance of power group I suppose I had a bigger platform from which to say my piece. It's sort of unfair the way these things operate but it's interesting that once you're separate from a group, once you're not just part of a mainstream group that's occasionally criticising it from within but you're outside of it criticising it from a different position, you get more than your fair share of press attention, I think. So by and large that was reasonably supportive.

EH The degree of support you've described, how much did this really reflect how shocked people were about the way Labor had operated in the 1980s, because more and more was coming out from the royal commission....

ALEXANDER Yes, that's true. TAPE SIX SIDE A ALEXANDER 92

EH .... all during this time. Because having the support from within the Labor Party seems to reflect a degree of just amazement.

ALEXANDER Yes, I think so. The support within the Labor Party was only a small minority, I think, of people there, but it was there nonetheless. I think it did reflect that. It was not so much support for me as an individual, I feel, but people were reacting to a situation which they'd known in their hearts was wrong in all sorts of ways for a long period of time, and the temporary rise of the Independents gave people a focus for that discontent and enabled them to express their discontent or to find a conduit or a voice for it in the Parliament - other than the Liberal Party. A lot of Labor or Left people felt very uncomfortable with taking their discontent across the political divide, so here were some people from within the Left of the political spectrum who they could identify with. I think that's why it was, temporarily at least, fairly successful as a way of articulating a different point of view.

EH Ian, the other question is: you had support from Labor and your constituency, and you also said you had some support from within the Liberals; does this reflect that Democrats' view of keeping the bastards honest? Did the people from the Liberal side of politics seem to be looking to you for that reason? How does it all fit together?

ALEXANDER I'm not sure actually. I think there was a mixture of motives. I think that some, like the Ian Thompsons who had their own perspective - dissident Liberals, as it were, who were in the same position as Frank and I as dissident Labor people....

EH But was he coming from the point of view of disenchantment with the Liberal Party?

ALEXANDER Long-term disenchantment with the leadership really, and the party processes, right through from preselection to Cabinet decision-making, I think. Others were, I guess, of the small 'l' liberal or the Democrats' point of view, yes, that a group of Independents had the ability to keep the bastards honest, or at least attempt to, and there was also support informally from people in and around Parliament who felt that parliamentary procedures had been abused, and they felt that a group of Independents was more able to keep parliamentary processes open and on track.

EH Oh, the administrative officers?

ALEXANDER Yes, and that, in a broader sense, reflects community concerns that parliamentary processes had been usurped by overzealous and unaccountable executives. I think there was a whole mixture of factors there that meant that we were seen in a more sympathetic light because it also became very much more stressful.

[break in recording] TAPE SIX SIDE A ALEXANDER 93

Yes, it was more stressful because people turned to you from every angle, really. There was an awful lot of discontent - sure, there still is; the current political debate suggests there is - with the major parties, and so Independents become a focus for individuals and groups who haven't been able to achieve their means through the mainstream parties. And there are a lot of those: people on the margins as well as those in the mainstream. So the office workload expanded dramatically. Once you put up your hand and say, "Hey, I'm Independent", everybody says, "That's a good idea; I'll take my cause to you." "Why can't you fix this for me?" or "What about this cause?" All sorts of things I never imagined existed suddenly came to my attention. It was exciting, but very stressful.

The same thing in the Parliament. Lots of people had ideas for pieces of legislation to change this or that or the other; they'd tried the mainstream parties and for various reasons hadn't achieved what they wanted so, again, they came to the Independents. Also, with the legislation itself, whereas when you're in a party you have the luxury of dividing the workload or not even paying attention to what's going through (unfortunately a lot of parliamentarians do that because of the workload), you couldn't afford to do that because you had to justify every vote you took and explain why you were voting a particular way. So we had to research every piece of legislation as thoroughly as we could. I had to take on extra staff in the office to help with that, but even so we were vastly overloaded and in the end I think that was one of the factors that contributed to my decision not to go on, because I found that it was just overwhelming me. I was busy before but I was much, much busier afterwards - both in the electorate and on the parliamentary front.

EH What does this reflect about our parliamentary system, do you think?

ALEXANDER I think it says it doesn't deal very well with an awful lot of issues that, not only at the individual level (there are an awful lot of individuals who run foul of the bureaucracy or private corporations who can't get their grievances redressed and who end up at parliamentarians' doors; you ask any politician, mainstream party or otherwise, and they all have a crop of those) but I think more broadly it reflects the fact that legislation often overlooks the very legitimate concerns of particular groups in the community. There are other things which don't get due consideration by Parliament. Major road projects and so on don't get properly debated by Parliament, they're just sort of considered in a global allocation of Budget money and then, unless they're brought to the attention of Parliament, they don't get any further consideration. A lot of other matters in the planning area, too, and no doubt other sectors of society. Yes, I think it really says that the parliamentary forum needs a big shake-up if it's to be more successful in meeting people's concerns.

EH Ian, when you went Independent had you planned on pursuing those things that we'd outlined really in the first interview of your major interests, like planning and social welfare? Had you thought that TAPE SIX SIDE A ALEXANDER 94 you maybe able to pursue these as an Independent, because these were areas where you had research expertise yourself?

ALEXANDER That's true, although unfortunately by that time I was so heavily loaded that I was not able to use that expertise really. A few people in the office did help a lot with that - people who shared those concerns and had a similar sort of outlook. A couple of them came into the office and gave me very valuable assistance there, which I never would have been able to get through my workload effectively without that. Ironically, those concerns were pushed down the agenda because there were a whole lot of other things to deal with, which I hadn't expected.

EH Yes, it was almost the opposite, wasn't it? Being Independent and being free.

ALEXANDER Yes, quite. You were free in one sense, but not free in another. It's a paradox really. I did find out things about planning issues that I probably wouldn't have found out about if I'd still been a party member - particular issues like Ellenbrook, for example, where there were a lot of environmental concerns as the land approval processes for the early stages of that development went through.

EH Does this mean people trusted you more as an Independent?

ALEXANDER I suppose they did, or even if they didn't they were prepared to approach me because they knew that we were in the balance of power. I think it was probably more that than....

EH It was the power? [laughter]

ALEXANDER That's right. They thought, "Ah, here's a chance to get this knocked out of contention or this issue addressed." Yes, I think that was more the clue to it.

END OF TAPE 6 SIDE A TAPE SIX SIDE B ALEXANDER 98

ALEXANDER I think the other thing was (while we're talking about the balance of power) that it doesn't always work that way, of course; it only becomes a powerful situation if the major parties are opposing each other. Quite often the major parties vote together. I know that people like Christabel Chamarette and the Greens had a very similar experience in Canberra: that on a lot of occasions the major parties support each other. Of course there are a lot of occasions when they don't, but in many cases in the Western Australian Parliament, for example - and I think one of them was the Ellenbrook issue I just mentioned - while there was discontent within the Liberal Party about what was happening and they'd actually flagged a motion to disallow the amendment which led to the rezoning of the land out there....

EH This is the Swan Valley development?

ALEXANDER Well, it's just to the west of the Swan Valley, around The Vines golf course development and north of there. It's a new corridor of development between the Swan Valley and the Morley area, really - north-east corridor they now call it. So the Liberals had been critical of it but they would not allow the matter to be debated, they wouldn't agree to get it to the top of the Notice Paper. The government opposed it because they were promoting the development, and it was pretty clear from my conversations with some of the Liberals that they were trying to have two bob each way. Discontent in the backbenches of the Liberal Party was being expressed by allowing them to put a motion on the books, but the hierarchy was saying, "We are not going to allow that motion to be debated." So, on that occasion, the opportunity to knock out a major amendment in the metropolitan region scheme and really make a difference to the way in which the metropolitan area developed, was lost, because the Liberals supported the government.

That was true of a number of other major decision-making things. Drug law reform would be one example where there was a lot of support in the community. I put in a Bill calling for a change of penalty on marijuana, but it was derided by the government and the Opposition. It is still being discussed ten years later, has been enacted elsewhere in South Australia, the ACT and so on, but the major parties were horrified at the idea, even though it was part of the Labor Party platform. The government wouldn't support it because they thought it was dangerous politically; the Opposition didn't support it, so again there was no chance of getting that sort of reform legislation seriously considered. So the position is less powerful than people realise because the major parties in the end often do support each other for pragmatic or other reasons.

EH This stress of having other people's hopes and aspirations put upon you, how was your family coping with all of this, because there is the personal aspect for politicians?

ALEXANDER That's true Erica. Yes, not very well. Well, I was living separately from my wife at the time and we eventually broke up after I left TAPE SIX SIDE B ALEXANDER 99

Parliament. I'm sure that the parliamentary experience was a contributing factor; a lot of other politicians have found the same thing. I was able to keep reasonable touch with the kids, fortunately, and the one advantage of a parliamentary occupation in terms of that is that, at least in Western Australia, the Parliament never sits during school holidays. I think they've done that deliberately. They've received some criticism over the years for it, but actually it's one way in which politicians can keep touch with their children.

EH That must be the only family-friendly aspect of the Western Australian Parliament.

ALEXANDER Basically, I think that's right, Erica. A lot of the time, unless you made deliberate plans to keep that time clear it would get swamped by your electorate work but I was able to deliberately keep at least one week of each holiday period clear so I could see at least something of the kids - more than the hurly burly of day-to-day. But overall it was a very fractured period - both family-wise and keeping up with friends. I lost a lot of friends just because I couldn't keep touch with them - too busy. That contributed to my decision to leave politics as well because I felt that the whole thing was just overwhelming my life and that while it may have been an important thing to do, I felt my emotional health in particular was starting to suffer.

EH Is it possible to generalise from your own experience to other people's that perhaps this is a common experience for politicians? Is it as much part of the job to experience this sort of stress and expectation?

ALEXANDER Talking to other colleagues about it at the time I'm sure that was true, but a lot of them seemed to accept it as an inevitable part of the job. Many complained and appeared to have the same (well I'm sure they did) stresses that I faced, but most still regarded the benefits as worthwhile - either the satisfaction of what they were doing, or in some cases just ego reasons, or in other cases ambition would keep people in there regardless of their personal cost, it appeared. But some people certainly made the decision not to go on for similar reasons to me. Frank Donovan, again, would be closest in that regard, and others who got close to the political process, who were interested in it, once they saw the stresses that MPs were under, decided not to go ahead with candidacy. I think a lot of people are put off going into politics for that reason, and once they get there they react in a variety of ways, I suppose.

I reckon there ought to be some sort of parliamentary support group, come to think of it - there never was at the time - to help politicians cope with these difficulties. Unfortunately the male culture is still dominant there and men are very bad at talking to each other about emotional issues, generally; and this really is an emotional issue, I think, above all else. I found it easier to talk to people outside of Parliament than people inside about these issues. TAPE SIX SIDE B ALEXANDER 100

EH We didn't really finish the Notre Dame question. We sort of touched on it a couple of times. There was a point where you were Chairman of a Select Committee in a Matter of Privilege Relating to a Premature Release of Public Accounts and Expenditure Review, a draft report on Notre Dame land grant. What was that?

ALEXANDER Sounds much more important than it is, Erica. My memory is that that was a committee that was set up when one of the members of the Public Accounts Committee (it may have even been Frank Donovan) released, or was seen to release, some information before the committee had actually reported to the Parliament. Technically that's known as a breach of parliamentary privilege because you're supposed to present your information to Parliament before commenting on it, because the information to committees is in confidence up until that point. It was, I think, an attempt to bring some heat on Frank, who had pursued this issue very, very vigorously, right from the time he'd been in Parliament, both inside and outside the Labor Party.

EH Had he suspected that there was something shonky about the whole Notre Dame [grant] and it was bound up with WA Inc as well?

ALEXANDER Yes, basically, that's right. He'd done a lot of digging and there was a lot of discontent within the party over the decision to grant the land to Notre Dame just after the '89 election. It was one of the factors that led to Dowding's downfall, I'm sure. It was David Parker's doing but it was under Dowding's leadership. Yes, somehow [Dennis] Horgan, who was sponsor of the property purchasers for Notre Dame, was part of the WA Inc web and there appeared to be.... well, regardless of corruption, certainly Notre Dame was given preferential treatment that was unfair from a number of points of view - principle as well as practice. So Frank pursued that very, very vigorously, because he was on the Public Accounts Committee, and a number of Opposition members shared his doubts, and I think that this was the government's attempt to put the heat on Frank at a time when he was wanting to pursue the issue very strongly.

He'd sponsored a motion of censure against Carmen Lawrence on the issue because he argued that she'd lied to the Parliament. I actually didn't support that censure motion in the end because I felt that the case against Carmen hadn't been proven and I also felt that if she'd lost that motion in the Parliament she probably would have had to go to the polls, and I'd given a commitment - this is the only commitment I did make to the Labor Party when I went Independent - that I wouldn't use my position to bring the government down prematurely. I allowed a qualifier, I said, "Unless there's some sort of huge scandal that demands action." But that certainly wasn't the case in Notre Dame; it was a scandal but it didn't seem to be a scandal of that proportion, and certainly the Premier was implicated but I couldn't see that she was implicated where a no confidence motion (which it could have become) was warranted. TAPE SIX SIDE B ALEXANDER 101

EH That's interesting that you limited your power as an Independent.

ALEXANDER Yes. Well, I suppose there must have been some residual loyalty to the party, Erica. Maybe it was misplaced in retrospect but at the time I felt that.... Well, I initially limited myself in terms of Supply. You know, I guaranteed not to vote against the Budget, and most Independents I note now still do that because they don't want to be seen to prematurely force the government to an election unless there's a real reason for it, other than just opposing the government on an issue or a particular set of issues. But when it became clear to me that the Opposition would exploit my position, and Frank's as well.... they put up many more motions of no confidence once we went Independent because they knew they had a chance of getting them passed, and every time, of course, I had to make a decision - do I or don't I support this minister or the Premier? More often than not, in this particular case, it was the Premier.

So yes, you're right, that did limit our power. I'm not sure, but by and large I think it was a legitimate limitation because I think as much as Independents can contribute to the opening up of the system they can also contribute to its destruction if they're not careful.

EH So it was an ethical decision, do you think?

ALEXANDER Sort of. It was a mixture of ethical and residual loyalty, I think. It wasn't entirely ethical, I don't think - maybe nothing is in politics, the waters are too muddy. [laughter]

EH Sorry, I distracted you from this matter of privilege that you were discussing.

ALEXANDER As I remember, the committee in the end reported that, yes, there had been a leak of information and it was a possible breach of privilege but nothing should be done. I think the Parliament reluctantly accepted that in the end, or the government reluctantly accepted that. It was a sort of compromise; on the one hand, "Naughty boy Frank", but on the other hand it doesn't warrant anything more than that. It was a storm in a teacup Erica, basically, that particular aspect of the Notre Dame thing, and I felt that it was the government trying to flex its muscles beyond that limitation which we'd put on them. In that case they were trying to take advantage of us, rather than the Opposition trying to take advantage of us, by appealing to our sense of ethics.

EH Did the press vigorously pursue the Notre Dame University and land grant?

ALEXANDER Patchily. I mean, under pressure eventually the government of course backed off the original land grant - partly because of the pressure from the other universities who said, "Hey, if Notre Dame's TAPE SIX SIDE B ALEXANDER 102 going to get some land, what about us?" Eventually they all did get a piece of land somewhere up in the Wanneroo area, to the east of Joondalup, in an area which, incidentally, should have remained rural, but that's another story.

EH Ian, just to round things off today, this question of your role in politics and the role of a politician - the question between being an idealist and a pragmatist, I guess - is one that you've struggled with, it seems, the way you've reflected in this interview on your own role in the Parliament. Could you just comment on that?

ALEXANDER Yes, well I suppose it is very difficult to implement ideals through the parliamentary process that we've got, I think is the conclusion I came to in the end. You can occasionally get close to seeing a principle of yours either supported or promoted, but it often comes at a big cost. For example, once I'd gone Independent there were a lot of matters I could pursue outside of those where the major parties would support each other, but quite often I'd have to get the support of the Liberal Party to do so, and I felt uncomfortable, ideologically, with that position. In other words, I wasn't a true Independent. In fact I called myself a Labor Independent deliberately because I said, "Well I'm still Labor, I'm just not actually in the Labor Party; I still support the Labor Party principles but I'm independent of their processes."

EH I think I phrased that badly. I meant idealism versus pragmatism. I think I said realism.

ALEXANDER No, I think you might have said pragmatism; perhaps I just sort of got off on another track. Pragmatism I've never been comfortable with, and that's why, I guess, I bring up this example of the Liberal Party: that it is a pragmatic thing to seek the support of your ideological opponents in order to achieve an end objective, and I'm still not sure. In the case of the Fitzgerald Street bus bridge, for example - okay its only a small issue but it illustrates the point. I was dealing with Reg Withers there, who's an out and out Liberal, always has been - sort of independent, which is why he and I paradoxically were able to work together. We just bumped into each other one day and he said, "Hey, what about this Fitzgerald Street bus bridge? Are you going to oppose that in Parliament?" I said, "There's an idea!" He said, "I'll help you." It all steamrolled from there.

In a sense I was being used by Reg Withers and the Liberal Party to promote their particular cause. I agreed with them, I supported it on principle, but there's a fine line between that and being pragmatic and embarrassing the government for pragmatic rather than philosophical reasons. I wasn't quite comfortable with that process, even though it was an interesting learning experience.

I suppose outside of the parliamentary forum what I see now, some years later, is that there are ways to change things through community action TAPE SIX SIDE B ALEXANDER 103 and community involvement, which I think are probably just as effective, if not more effective, than the parliamentary processes. On the one hand I think that's a measure of the inadequacy of our parliamentary system, and on the other hand I think it's the community finding its voice in the face of all this disillusionment with the established processes. So that's the level now where I prefer to be involved.

EH To what extent is the Green party operating in that kind of a framework?

ALEXANDER Pretty much so, I think. It's a party where ideals by and large are more important than pragmatics, I think, although there's a lot of discussion about that within the Green party. I'm not as active a member as I envisaged. I think what happened was when I got involved in the Green party (I'm still an active supporter, but not an active member) I found to my disillusionment the same sorts of processes starting to appear within the Green party. And why? Because there's a lot of ex- Labor and other people from different parts of the political spectrum, many of whom are there with general intent, but many others who I think are probably there for the wrong reasons. They still are attached to the idea of a party gaining some sort of strong power, and the way I see it, sure, that's necessary if you going to implement changes, but there are other ways of doing it.

For example, a lot of people suggest that with the Green party their main aim should be to green the other parties rather than to be in government as a Green party in their own right, because then this how do you handle power and the question you put of pragmatics versus ideals has to be faced fairly and squarely. Many people, I think, feel that if there was a Green government it might start off with strong ideals but it might end up getting pushed too far in the pragmatic direction because of the way our government and parliamentary system works.

END OF TAPE 6 SIDE B

END OF INTERVIEW