Callow or shallow?
When Nelson Mandela died last year, Tony Abbott joined many other world leaders in singing his praises.
“The world mourns the passing of Nelson Mandela. Nelson Mandela will
forever be remembered as more than a political leader, he was a moral
leader. He spent much of his life standing against the injustice of
apartheid.”
But Tony didn’t always feel that way.
When Abbott was President of the Students’ Representative Council at
Sydney University, he wrote in Honi Soit that Voluntary Student
Unionism “would finally stop all students being taxed so the SRC can
fund groups such as International Socialists, South African Terrorists,
the Spartacists, Lidcombe Health Workers Collective etc. which are quite
irrelevant, not to say obnoxious, to student purposes.”
Abbott’s “South African Terrorists” were the members of Mandela’s
African National Congress (ANC) political party, to whom the SRC had
previously been giving money.
Malcolm Fraser’s Liberal Party, and its associated Liberal student
groups at universities, supported the Commonwealth campaign to abolish
Apartheid. Abbott did not join these efforts. He was President of the
University of Sydney Democratic Club, an affiliate organization of B.A.
Santamaria’s militantly anti-Communist National Civic Council and
Democratic Labor Party.
These organisations actively supported South Africa’s Apartheid
government, if not the Apartheid system itself. Abbott wrote and
published the club’s bulletin, The Democrat, and was a close friend of
Santamaria. The Apartheid government was seen in Western conservative
circles as an important bulwark against Afro-Communist tendencies, which
the ANC was thought to exhibit.
Anti-Apartheid activity was alive and well in Australia at this time.
Many Australians supported fundraising efforts for the ANC, and
participated in anti-Apartheid demonstrations throughout the 1960s and
1970s. The racially exclusive Springboks were banned from playing in
Australia between 1974 and the end of Apartheid in 1994. In 1981, the
Fraser government refused permission for the aircraft carrying the
Springboks to a tour of New Zealand to refuel on Australian territory.
Abbott, however, accepted a rugby scholarship to tour South Africa in
what former Federal Labor Minister Barry Cohen described as a
“universally acknowledged… promotional tour of Apartheid”.
Tony isn’t the only Liberal to change his tune since University days.
A few years earlier, a young Malcolm Turnbull, while describing
then-PM Gough Whitlam as an arrogant egomaniac, lauded the Labor Party
as a “wealth of opinion and class…diverse and less likely than the
conservatives to blindly rally behind one great leader”. Menzies’
Liberals, on the other hand, had “warmed the treasury benches” for 23
years with “the steak-fed bottoms of the sons of Toorak and the
champions of Double Bay” – an interesting observation as Malcolm grew up
in Vaucluse and Double Bay and he and his wife Lucy have lived in the
Wentworth electorate all their lives.
In 1984, Christopher Pyne signed up for the Adelaide University
Liberal Club and the Young Liberal Party before he even went to his
first lecture. Soon enough, he was running both shows. Ruthlessly he
purged right-wingers from the executive of the Liberal Club. When half
of the 400-strong membership threatened to quit in protest, Pyne
cheerfully collected the resignations. He has freely admitted that he
campaigned against the reintroduction of university fees purely to win
an election, a view he reiterated when interviewed recently saying
“Those people who see me as some kind of political warrior are right to
think that I would do everything I can to win, so that the Coalition is
in government … I’ll do what I need to do to position the Coalition to
win elections.”
Sydney University was a very different place by 1987, when Joe Hockey
took the reins of the SRC Presidency. The dominant political grouping
was the Sydney University Liberal Club, a conglomerate of liberals, soft
conservatives, and careerist moderates.
Liberals and Left Action were the two major factions on the SRC, but
Hockey was from neither. Indeed, he disparaged the student newspaper,
Honi Soit, for their obsession with the ‘return of Liberalism’ and its
reluctance to report on student protests.
“One wonders whether Honi Soit is a NEWSpaper or a front for
political masturbation,” he wrote in a 1987 Presidential report. “They
do not seem to have any shortage of contributors espousing the virtues
of Liberalism on campus but when there is student news there is no local
coverage.”
Hockey’s policy statement in the 1986 election edition of Honi:
“There is no question in my mind that students will never accept fees. I
totally oppose any compromise the government may offer.”
His year as SRC President was chiefly spent fighting Labor’s re-introduction of university fees,
which had been abolished under Gough Whitlam. But according to a 2012
profile by Bernard Keane, he was “accused of failing to aggressively
lead student demonstrations for fear of endangering his Solicitors’ and
Barristers’ Admission Board enrolment”.
Hockey’s backers, a ticket called “Varsity”, were decidedly centrist
and unaffiliated, declaring they would “fight the burden of factionalism
presently hindering the SRC’s effective operation”. In stark contrast
to Abbott, Varsity was emphatic: “There should be no further government
cuts to university funding.”
Whilst I acknowledge that these were words spoken a long time ago, it
appears that, as university students, our current ministers were more
endowed with confidence than conviction. As their careers have unfolded
we have seen political expediency trump passion with backflips on not
only university fees but climate change, paid parental leave, banking
regulation, unaccompanied minors being sent offshore, environmental
protection – the list of discarded beliefs is long and growing.
Yes, they were young, but one wonders whether their views were those of callow youth or shallow men.
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