Mungo MacCallum: JP/J.B. Djwan

Few people on the planet can claim a close relationship with a round dozen of Australian prime ministers. Even fewer would know of their diverse sex scandals.

Mungo MacCallum has been an Australian political journalist, author and commentator for more than four decades; now, at almost 68, he is still “keeping the bastards honest”, albeit these days from the home on the New South Wales coast he shares with his wife, Jenny, and their two dogs, Rajah and Ruby, rather than from Canberra’s Press Gallery.

“I’ve known, personally, 12 Australian prime ministers and I can only say that three of them were chaste. The rest were adulterers of Olympic standards. In America they [journalists] sift through these things, but in Canberra we leave them alone unless it impinges on the national interest,” says MacCallum of the Canberra Press Gallery code of silence on the private lives of the country’s politicians.

It is about politics and its recent history in Australia that MacCallum still chooses to speak. Born into a rather upper-crust Sydney family that included Liberal conservative politician William Wentworth on his mother’s side, the staunchly Labor — left wing — MacCallum goes against his equally staunchly conservative Liberal lineage; he suggests his DNA was the ink that blotted the copy book of both.

“I used to say two great Australian families met in me and both lost,” he jokes, adding that his family was not of the wealthy Sydney elite.

“I was a scholarship boy right through my education. I studied mathematics at University but I sort of drifted into journalism because it was so much fun,” explains MacCallum, who still looks more like a mathematician with his beard and, in former days, the suede shoes that would set Rupert Murdoch’s teeth on edge when MacCallum worked for Murdoch’s The Australian newspaper.

“The editor at the time, Adrian Deaner, suggested I change jobs as there had been a major falling out with Rupert. He had said to Adrian ‘I did not found this newspaper as a refuge for soft bearded lefties who wear suede shoes,’ and I could hardly fail to recognize myself in that. And there was The Nation Review, which was a very comfortable place to land,” remembers MacCallum of a newspaper that was born into the political and social revolution that was Australia in the early 1970s.

MacCallum also had disagreements when his uncle William Wentworth was on the floor of Parliament and MacCallum was in its Press Gallery.

“We did have some ferocious arguments but I still admire the work he [Wentworth] did as Australia’s first aboriginal affairs minister,” admits MacCallum of Wentworth’s drive to remove discrimination against Australia’s Aborigines from the Constitution via a national referendum, thus effectively giving Australia’s first peoples voting rights.

This recognition — of the equality of Aboriginal people — may have marked the beginnings of chinks in the Liberal party’s armor.

For the previous two decades, the Liberal Party under Robert Menzies had controlled the nation with a “born to rule” self-belief fatted on the British outpost’s diet of Queen and country jingoism.

However, by 1972, with newspapers such as The Nation Review and journalists such as MacCallum questioning the legitimacy of the “born to rule” notion, Australia was ready for a change. “It was Time” and leading the charge toward a more socialist form of government was one of Australia’s arguably greatest statesmen, Gough Whitlam.

Within weeks of his landslide election, troops in Vietnam were called home, university entrance was made free and the universal health care coverage, Medicare, was created.

The Liberals were not going down without a fight. They could not comprehend they were no longer in government, recalls MacCallum.

“The Liberals had grown so accustomed to the idea that they were rulers by natural selection; there was the law of gravity and the law that the Libs were in power in Canberra. They never accepted they had lost [the 1972 election].

“I remember in the first two years of the Labor government when Liberal ministers would walk into the prime minister’s office like they were still in power,” says MacCallum of the short years under Whitlam that ended when then governor general John Kerr dismissed the Labor government in 1975, what MacCallum sees as greatest the abuse of democracy in Australia’s history.

And it could have been so different, MacCallum says.

“John Kerr was a terrible mistake. Gough Whitlam didn’t know anything about Kerr and the people in the Labor party who did, Whitlam dismissed as bearing grudges…

“I have a personal story as I was on the inner circle [of Whitlam’s administration]; during late night drinks in Whitlam’s office the subject of who should be the next governor general came up. I suggested poet Judith Wright. This appealed to Whitlam enormously because as a woman and an artist, but the hard heads insisted it had to be a lawyer.

“I think history shows I was right,” says MacCallum with his usual chuckle. He adds that at the time he described Kerr in The Nation Review as “a well-marinated blood plum topped off with cheap yoghurt,” a description that Kerr never disputed.

The 1975 dismissal of an elected Australian government still burns hot in the heart of MacCallum who counts Gough Whitlam, Paul Keating and, surprisingly, the Liberal John Gorton, as the prime ministers he most admires of the 12 he has covered as a journalist, three who were all “risk takers but none in power for more than three years”.

MacCallum, with the grace one would expect of someone who has been around politics and politicians as long as he, will not be drawn on the state of Indonesian politics except to say, “in breaking my own rule [on not discussing foreign politics] the progress in Indonesia has been absolutely terrific”.

His advice for a new democracy: “There will be times when it looks to be easier to go back to the old certainties rather than press on, but don’t fall for the temptation. Democracy isn’t easy. Churchill said ‘Democracy is the worst form of government, apart from all the rest,’ and he was right.

“Democracy is one of the hardest forms of government to make work, but in the end it is worth the effort. Another thing — democracy is not just the right to vote every few years; it’s the right to participate fully in government; democracy is not just the form of government but the attitudes of the citizens.”

MacCallum saves his harshest criticism for the most recent Liberal Australian leader, the now fallen John Howard who used the “overboard affair” of refugees to shore up failing support in his 2001 election run.

“The overboard affair was horrible beyond description. John Howard was a clever politician but absolutely megalomaniacal and hell bent on power. He very consciously used the overboard affair for that election. But the population went with it.

“I was horrified at the hate that came out during that election. When he finally went, he left two things for which he will never be forgiven: One for locking children up behind razor wire until they literally went mad and the other was abandoning his own citizens to the imprisonment and torture by a foreign power.”

Of the current Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, MacCallum is softer.

“Rudd is almost as clever a politician as Howard — but a much nicer one. I don’t object to anything he has done, but I do wish he would do more and faster. But all Labor leaders still have the horror of Whitlam [the 1975 dismissal] behind them.”

MacCallum’s books include Mungo: The Man Who Laughs, How to be a Megalomaniac or, Advice to a Young Politician, Political Anecdotes and War and Pieces: John Howard’s Last Election.

Mungo MacCallum was in Bali as a delegate at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival.

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