The Money Men by Chris Bowen (superbooks4u .txt) 📕

needed finance: finance that Australia’s conservative banks were not willing to provide. The company was ultimately unable to accept the Malaysian contract it had won, and the lack of expansion meant that the business eventually died. Keating would later confirm that the experience of watching his father go through this ordeal would influence his view that Australian banks were too conservative for the national good, and that a dose of banking competition was necessary to improve the availability of capital in Australia.

In 1959 Paul Keating took a clerical position in the then Sydney County Council, the electricity supplier to the inner suburbs of Sydney, in a rather conventional school-to-work transition in the 1950s for a bright son of the working class. Keating studied for his Leaving Certificate at night, and later studied maths and electrical engineering at Belmore Technical College. He stayed at the County Council until 1965, but by then politics had transitioned from a family hobby to a burning passion. Keating had begun visiting former NSW premier Jack Lang in 1962. In what became a habitual weekly audience, Lang would talk to his young protégé about economics and the importance of seizing and wielding power. Taking power was soon something that Keating was determined to do.

By this stage, Keating was involved not just in his local Labor branch but also in the Youth Council, the precursor to today’s Young Labor. He ran a ticket with his friend Laurie Brereton which saw Keating as president and Brereton as secretary from 1967 to 1969. Keating then set his sights on the right to represent his corner of south-western Sydney in the national parliament. The sitting Labor member for the seat of Banks, Eric Costa, had announced his retirement from parliament, and Keating had a comfortable lead in the race to be the new ALP candidate thanks to his many friends from the local Catholic Youth Organisation, whom he had encouraged to join the ALP in the seat. But Keating then experienced the Australian political phenomenon that has wrecked plenty of promising careers over the years: a redistribution. The electoral commissioners moved the boundary between the seat of Banks and the neighbouring seat of Blaxland. This had the double impact of making Banks less safe for the Labor Party and moving a substantial chunk of Keating’s support into Blaxland.

Keating switched his focus to Blaxland, where he had strong though not overwhelming support. To win, he had to take on future lord mayor of Sydney Doug Sutherland, the son of local Labor MP Jack Stewart, and the left-wing academic Bill Junor, his main opponent. On the night of the preselection count, Junor edged ahead with 124 votes to Keating’s 108. However, there were forty-nine votes as yet uncounted due to a challenge to the entitlement of the voters to be included in the ballot. Keating’s forces wanted them counted on the night—they were concerned about the fate of the ballot box containing the uncounted votes if was left with the local returning officer, who was sympathetic to Junor—but the Left did not. Brereton made frantic calls from a phone booth to the NSW general returning officer, Lindsay North, urging him to come and take control of the ballot box, but without success. Eventually Brereton rang Labor leader Gough Whitlam at his Cabramatta home and prevailed on him to instruct North to get out of his bed. Whitlam did so, clearly caring enough about the fate of the promising young candidate Keating to impose his will on an organisational official.

Brereton’s phone call and Whitlam’s intervention were key. The relevant committee of the party accepted the rights of the forty-nine voters to have their wishes counted in the ballot. It turned out that forty-eight of them had voted for Keating, giving him a 146 to 125 margin in the final count.

Despite Blaxland being a safe Labor seat and the party feeling confident under new leader Gough Whitlam, Keating nonetheless campaigned hard in the lead-up to the October 1969 federal election. He adopted cutting-edge techniques that were then unusual in Australia and that he had drawn directly from the United States, such as a large campaign bus daubed with his name and picture, and the introduction of the now ubiquitous corflute posters that were of exactly the same design as US president Jack Kennedy’s earlier in the decade.

Keating was rewarded with 61 per cent of the vote, and he soon made his mark in parliament. Parliamentary veteran and raconteur Fred Daly would later recall:

When you are speaking in the House it’s not what you say but how you say it. You could go to sleep in the Parliament with four speeches out of five, but the minute Keating got up you knew that not only was he talking with knowledge of his subject, well prepared, but in his voice there was something that made you listen and if you butted in you were liable to be sunk.6

Over the next few years, Keating was noticed, but not quite enough for his liking. He ran for the ministry after the election of the Whitlam government, but narrowly missed out to fellow NSW MP and former diplomat Bill Morrison. Undeterred, Keating continued his professional development, speaking on economic matters and reading widely. He was close to NSW ministers Lionel Bowen and Rex Connor, and continued to seek out older men who would nurture him and help expand his mind.

It was a bittersweet moment when Keating was elected to the Whitlam ministry in October 1975. It had been his ambition to join the Cabinet, but it came at the expense of the resignation of minerals and energy minister Rex Connor, for whom Keating had a great personal affection, even if their approach to economics differed markedly. Keating was made minister for northern Australia, but his tenure was to be a brief one. He was sworn in on 21 October and then dismissed on 11 November along with the rest of the Whitlam government. While rushing past him in a