Seeing Red: The Gospel According To Paul

Paul Keating was the stand-out, consummate performer in the Australian federal parliament from 1983, when the ALP, led by Bob Hawke, won government, until John Howard knocked Labor from the perch in 1996. Keating was first Hawke Government Treasurer, then Deputy Prime Minister and, after a brutal and public leadership contest with Hawke, PM from 1991.

He rose from working class Bankstown to enter federal parliament in 1969 as the then youngest member, aged 25. He was a product of brutal NSW ALP faction fights, which featured branch stacking, stand over tactics and thug violence. Keating was a leading light of the Right faction, which was a genuinely right-wing grouping (unlike in today’s ALP where factional labels have lost all ideological meaning).

However, he was far more than the sum of those parts. His cutting wit was a weapon that he used freely and Question Time was his comedic stage. There are numerous collections on YouTube of Keating’s caustic humour, which make all today’s leaders look lame. The LNP opposition could not lay a glove on him. From the day Bob Hawke became PM, the lead story on daily news bulletins would often be Keating’s latest outrageous put down of the Tories.

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So, The Gospel According to Paul effectively writes itself. A great deal of the script is simply a transcription of things that Keating actually said. So, we hear of Peter Costello as “all tip and no iceberg”, or that the Opposition “could not manage a tart shop”, or of Andrew Peacock: “We’re not interested in the views of painted, perfumed gigolos.”

The play’s author and sole performer, Jonathan Biggins, has been touring the show for six years and carries off his 90 minutes on stage with aplomb. This “gospel” is a hit with audiences nation-wide.

It is a time-travel experience back to an era when politicians did not mouth bland talking points that had first been run past focus groups. Keating spoke from the heart and fired from the hip and his barbs not only hit home, they lit up the nation.

As a night at the theatre, The Gospel According to Paul is superb. Joanathan Biggins has Keating’s physical mannerisms down pat and he throws everything at the audience, even breaking into vaudeville song and dance, which nods at the theatricality of the real Keating’s political performance and his claim he could always ‘switch to vaudeville’.

As political theatre The Gospel According to Paul is wonderful, as political history it suffers precisely from the fact that it is Paul Keating explaining his role in history. Keating’s ego is famously colossal and his view of his achievements is equally monumental.

Many things described positively in this play were controversial at the time and have proven to be problematic to this day. For those of us who lived through that era, memories might vary markedly from Keating’s rose-coloured view of the Hawke-Keating period.

When recounting the formation of the first Hawke cabinet we hear rattled off the names of people Keating regards as luminaries. Some of these names may still ring bells, like Gareth Evans (Foreign Minister). Others, such as Brian Howe (Minister for Social Security from 1984) may not.

Evans was infamously photographed clinking champagne glasses with Ali Alatas, a leader of the Indonesian military government. “This is an historically unique moment,” said Evans as they celebrated the signing of the oil and gas deal sharing out the stolen wealth of the country they were flying over at the time, East Timor. This shameful act does not appear in the play.

Brian Howe used his ministerial power and connections with the federal leadership of the Australian Clerical Officers Association (now CPSU) to smash the six weeks-long NSW Social Security staff strike in 1988. The workers were striking against job cuts. Effectively they were struggling against neo-liberalism. Their defeat ushered in the era of social security being changed from a citizen’s right in time of hardship to a “service” that is offered to “customers” with help and hassle added.

The neo-liberal approach to government service delivery stole what is called the social wage from the Australian working class. That theft is why government provision of housing is so parlous, why social services do not meet social need, why so many people sleep on the streets, why ambulances ramp at hospitals.

In the 2006 election the ACTU ran a brilliant attack ad using an ABS graph showing the decline in wages share of GDP under the Howard government. However, they quickly pulled the ad because the graph showed the decline had started with the election of the Hawke government and had only worsened under Howard. Unfortunately, the ABS no longer produces those annual graphs.

While Paul Keating collected antique clocks and listened to Mahler, Australian working people had our share of national wealth reduced. We have been robbed blind by successive Labor and Liberal governments since the election of Bob Hawke and the entertaining singing, dancing and acid-tongued witticisms can’t obscure that fact.

The Gospel According to Paul
Written and performed by Jonathan Biggins
On at the Black Swan Theatre Company at the State Theatre Centre until 3 August.

By Barry Healy

* Barry Healy is a life-long Marxist who first came to Perth in the 1970s to establish the Resistance young socialist group. He was a founder of the Green Left and currently edits the Culture section of the Red Spark website.

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