Chapter 28 Making Adjustments

Election Strategies

Friday, December 15^th – Saturday December 16th, 2000

Michelle dropped me off outside Central Station at 7:00 on the Friday morning, I had plenty of time to get my ticket, and find my way to the Canberra train before it left at 7:30. Ticket in hand, I walked to platform five, where my train was waiting – one of the recently upgraded DEB sets, a total of seven cars, the train would split into two parts at Queanbeyan, the front four cars going the short distance to Canberra, the remaining three cars to Bombala, via Cooma. The line from Cooma to Bombala had recently been reopened, and there was an investigation into extending that line to the far South Coast at Eden. I found my seat in the first class car, I wanted to have the extra room, with a table allowing me to do some work.

While the DEB sets weren’t as luxurious as the XPT trains, they were still comfortable, and there was the dining / buffet car attached, allowing me to get some coffee. There was plenty of room to walk around and stretch my legs. The train pulled out of Central on the dot of 7:30, and quickly made its way out of the Sydney area, and when it stopped at Mittagong around 8:45, I walked down to the buffet car to get a coffee, and a rather tasty looking pastry. I had spent the first part of the journey reading the morning paper, there was nothing all that new, just more speculation about the upcoming Federal election. Neither party had made their policy statements yet, being so close to the Christmas break, but I expected major policy statements from both parties in the week between Christmas and New Year.

The journey was relaxing, I enjoyed looking out the window at the passing scenery, particularly the final stage of the part to Queanbeyan, as the line went through the rugged Molonglo Gorge. There was a brief pause at Queanbeyan station as the front section of the train was disconnected from the part continuing to Cooma, then we travelled the last few kilometres to Canberra, arriving just before noon. I grabbed my overnight bag, and walked the short distance across to the Diplomat Hotel, checking in and getting my room key. Up in my room – just a standard room, no spa tub in the bathroom this time (since there would be no Cathy to join me). I unpacked my bag, and headed down to the café to have a light lunch. I saw Bob McMullen and Anthony Albanese, they waved me across to their table, and I pulled up a chair. I knew both of them quite well, and Anthony was my local Federal member, since Balmain was in the Federal electorate of Grayndler.

“Will Morris, great to see you again,” Bob said, shaking my hand.

“Comrade, great to have you here,” Anthony said. “I hear you are back in the halls of academia, how’s that going?”

“Good to see both of you,” I said. “Lots of challenges for me at the University, I have to repair several years of maladministration, restore the reputation of the School, get things back on track.”

“You’re probably the right guy for the job,” Bob said.

“I hear it was you that got those message transcripts from the Navy that torpedoed Howard,” Anthony said. “That was very well done, Will.”

“No comment,” I said. “And even if I was responsible, I’m not saying anything, to protect my sources.”

“Understood,” he replied. “Still ... if that was you, you deserved a special party commendation!”

“You’re still involved in some small-scale property development, aren’t you, Will?” Anthony asked. “You might find this afternoon’s discussion on housing policy and affordability interesting, Tanya Plibersek will be talking about some new activities in the housing sector that we need to address.”

The discussion with Tania would be interesting, I knew her well, since she was the Federal member for the seat of Sydney, she had taken over when Peter Baldwin retired. She was also a member of the Labor left, and a damn good, hardworking local member.

“Well, I am a very minor player in the property development arena,” I said. “But that will be interesting, I will be curious to see if what she has to say correlates to things I’ve been hearing that are going on in the construction industry in Sydney.”

“That will be interesting to hear,” Anthony said. “The construction industry in Sydney has always been a bit of the ‘wild west’, some pretty ruthless figures involved.”

“There are just some rules to follow, if you do that, and don’t try to cut people out of a job, things are fine,” I said. “The protection rackets have pretty much been removed. Tommy Domican was very much involved in some of those standover tactics.”

“No loss to the country when he blew himself up!” Anthony said.

If only you knew the whole story, I thought to myself.

We enjoyed a light lunch, then I went up to my room to have a quick freshen up before the afternoon’s session started. I took my notes and other documents from my case, and went back down to the meeting room. Paul Keating was there, along with the two I had met for lunch, and another twenty or so of Paul’s front bench, those who had been on the shadow ministry. There were two people I recognized from the party’s head office, too.

Paul welcomed us, and told us that we had a ‘now or never’ chance to regain government, a lot needed to be done between now and the election date.

“I have Barry Thomas, who most of you know from our Federal office,” Paul said. “He’s got some solid information from the recent set of polling the office has commissioned; the aim is that these opinion poll results will show us what areas are of the most interest, most concern to the voters. We can use this to focus our campaign, and not waste time getting sucked into pointless arguments that I’m sure Howard and the coalition will want us to do. So, over to you, Barry.”

“Thank you, Paul,” Barry said. “Now, everyone should have in front of them a copy of the polling results. It goes without saying that these are to be kept completely confidential, we don’t want any of the information leaking to our opponents. Now, we took a different approach to this round of polling, as well as getting people’s opinions on the various questions, we also asked ‘how important will a particular party’s position on that subject be to your voting intentions?’. We wanted to determine just how important something was to people. We have broken the results up by location, age range, gender, religion, and general party preference.

“If you look at the summary on page three, you can see that along with the usual suspects, as it were, of taxation, education, the environment, and so forth, two things stand out. Firstly, ‘immigration’, both the numbers and the source of migrants are matters that are really of little importance to the majority of voters. So, because the Liberal’s dislike of immigration is what triggered the election, it’s really not a big deal to most people. Let’s not get sucked into arguments about what we should do with illegal immigrants, who should be a ‘refugee’ or not, or where the bulk of immigrants to this country should come from. The other big point – and this is going to be our topic of discussion for this afternoon – is housing, specifically housing affordability, of both housing ownership and rental. People are finding it more and more difficult to find suitable housing – not just in the big cities, like Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, but across the country, in country towns as well.

“We’ve been doing some research into why housing has become unaffordable for more and more people, and we have noticed an interesting trend in how residential accommodation is being developed in Australia. First, a history lesson, during World War Two, the government realized that when the war was over, there would be a shortage of housing for those returning from fighting – and that was even before the influx of refugees from Europe was considered. The Federal Government set up the original ‘Department of Housing’, to work with the states to expand the supply of affordable housing. These places were originally intended as rental accommodation, but when the coalition took over, their emphasis was on pushing for private home ownership, and coined the phrase ‘the great Australian dream’. Cities grew into the suburbs as we know them today, the focus was on the quarter acre block, detached houses – mainly three-bedroom, family homes. In some areas, apartment blocks were developed, some of these were built on slightly larger blocks, and would have eight to twelve individual units, generally owner occupied. Ownership schemes – like the strata title system – were put in place to make individual ownership of units in these blocks much simpler legally.

“What we haven’t seen in this country is what the United States calls ‘apartment complexes’; where a company will develop on a large site many buildings, each with twelve or more individual apartments in them, maybe up to a thousand units in the one complex, with on-site management. Some of these companies might own lots of these complexes across the country, and these apartments are only available to rent. What we in Australia call ‘apartments’ are known as condominiums – ‘condos’ – in the US, where individual units are owned on something like our strata title basis. The same applies here in single family homes, if a particular house is not lived in by the owners, they will rent it out, usually through a leasing agent. You don’t see large tracts of single-family dwellings owned by a corporation, purely for lease.

“We are pretty familiar with what I’ve described, that’s how things are across Australia, and they have been for at least a hundred years or more. But, things are starting to change, we are starting to see the influx of large-scale corporate ownership of rental properties – either multi-unit buildings, or single-family dwellings. They don’t want to ‘build to sell’, but ‘build to lease’. That allows the owners to manipulate the market rate for rental accommodation, and restrict the number of places available for sale to owners. I see we have Will Morris here, and I know Will has been involved in the Sydney property development arena. I wonder, Will, if you might make some comments from your perspective, what are you seeing?”

There were some very astute observations there, I had been hearing some similar stories from the Ramos brothers.

“Thanks, Barry, I have to say, your analysis is pretty spot on,” I said. “Now, let me preface my remarks with I’m am just a very minor player in the property development field. We – that is, me and my business partners – work in a specialized field. We redevelop run-down terrace buildings and similar in the inner west of Sydney. For example, about twelve months ago, I saw for sale, a row of five terrace houses in Balmain, they were just one strong storm away from being a pile of rubble. I didn’t want to see them lost forever, so I purchased the whole row, and restored them to their former glory. I live in one, and the remaining are rented out. We have done similar restoration and redevelopment work, generally selling the finished buildings.

“The decision for us between renting and selling the finished property is a function of our cash flow; the financing side is one of the major costs in any development project. For the Balmain project I mentioned, I happened to have the cash at hand to purchase the buildings, and fund most of the rebuilding effort, but otherwise, we would have had to borrow about one and a half million dollars. Now, we couldn’t have repaid that until the individual buildings were sold – while renting them out might bring in more money in the longer term, we couldn’t keep that loan just hanging around year after year.

“Now, there are some companies that are into the large-scale residential development, the mid-rise apartment blocks, like we are seeing built around Ashfield, Burwood, Harris Park, and so on – these are your Mirvacs, Grocons, and companies like that. But even they don’t have the financial resources to develop for pure rental units. These companies probably have several hundred million worth of projects under development at any one time, and that’s a lot of money to finance. The thing about property development is that you generally use lots of subcontractors – site prep, concreting, framing carpentry, plastering, electricians, and so on. If you can have several project bubbling alone, each at a different stage of completion, then you can keep the same set of subbies, moving them from one project to another. But that adds to your financing costs, the more work you have, the more you need to borrow, and the more important it is to sell finished units as soon as possible.

“Now, the property development community – in Sydney, at least – is pretty close-knit, you know all of the other players, the major subcontractors, and who is doing what. But these new developers, those who are doing major rental developments, they are new, they aren’t part of the ‘club’, as it were. They seem to be based overseas – the Middle-East, Dubai in particular, China, Hong Kong, and the USA. They don’t play by the usual rules, they bring in their own subcontractors, they seem to have their own sources of finance. They seem to be pretty ruthless to get whatever properties they want, somehow any local government objections disappear. I heard talk that one of these companies was trying to get involved in a project in Manly, converting a large strata title apartment building into rental units, until the local council stepped in, putting too many conditions on the development, and the business partners pulled out.”

“This seems to be a growing problem everywhere,” Tanya said. “So, how can the Federal government address it?”

“Firstly, get the Foreign Investment Review Board involved; any proposal that’s substantially funded from overseas interests that relate to residential housing – either single homes or unit development – will be subject to close review,” Anthony said. “Just like we don’t want ownership of rural properties – food production – to be owned by overseas interests, the same should be for residential accommodation.”

“The problem, as I see it,” I said, “is that prices are a function of supply and demand, that’s basic economics. If we look like we are going to constrain supply, then demand will increase, pushing prices up even more. But if supply exceeds demand, then prices will go down – along with the incentives for people to invest in real estate.”

“Wouldn’t that be a good thing?” Tanya said. “Housing shouldn’t be seen as a vehicle for investors to make windfall profits, people need housing and shelter, it’s a basic human right.”

“Now, let’s say we scrap negative gearing, where the tax system allows for 100% deductions of ‘losses’ in real estate investments,” I said. “Lots of people will pull out of owning rental properties, they will sell them to owner-occupiers. That will see the price of houses for owner-occupiers fall, because supply will increase. But for people who can’t buy but must rent, the supply of rental properties will fall, rents will go up ... Unless somehow the government picks up the slack.”

“It’s a complex problem,” Paul said. “I don’t think we can solve it here today; so what I propose is in our first few months, we convene a ‘Housing Summit”, get all involved groups to take part, and work out a way for the future. We don’t want housing prices to be at the whim of investors, putting individual’s profits ahead of having affordable housing for the average Australian. Let’s break for afternoon tea, and thank you for your insights to the industry, Will.”

We moved over to where coffee and pastries were set up, and someone who I didn’t recognize came over to me, offering me his hand.

“Professor Morris? Kevin Rudd, shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs,” he said. “I found you remarks on the property development industry quite interesting, and I can understand why you would not advocate a scrapping of the negative gearing rules, since that would have a serious impact on your personal finances from that source. I assume that a lot of your development projects involve these major redevelopments of inner-city areas.”

You arrogant, ignorant prick, I thought, you know nothing about my business, but I didn’t have to say anything, as Tanya Plibersek came to my defence.

“You’re completely wrong there, Kevin,” she said. “I know the work Will and his associates are doing, they take run-down terraces, and restore them, ready for people to buy and move into. I know personally they have saved close to thirty historic terraces from demolition, and they have families living in them, having removed a serious blight on the local community. You owe Will an apology!”

“I didn’t realize that, Tanya,” Kevin said. “My apologies, Will, I didn’t know.”

“No worries,” Kevin. “It just that housing, and property development can be a fairly emotional subject. People don’t want the character of their local area to change, let some other part of the city take the bulk of new housing development.”

I still felt he was an arrogant prick; I had mentioned in my speech just what the type of development was that we undertook. I guess he had his own preconceptions, and didn’t want facts to interfere. At least he moved on, to talk to some of the others, while Tanya apologized to me on his behalf.

“Don’t mind Kevin, he’s one of these ‘holier-than-thou’ religious types,” she said. “But has a strong dislike of Catholics, I guess he was in a Catholic boarding school as a kid. Smart guy, knows a shitload about China ... But he has a huge chip on his shoulder.”

“As long as he’s not going to try to kill me, like some of my party opponents did,” I said.

After the break, we talked about some more policy matters, fighting privatization, rural and regional development, immigration. I presented some of the papers I had prepared, which were well-received, and Paul said that tomorrow, he wanted us to concentrate on how to deal with the current refugee situation. “Without upsetting the Navy”, he added.

That pretty much wrapped up the day’s business, I went upstairs to my room, showered, and got dressed for dinner with Ian and Shane. I made a quick call home, to let the others know how the day had gone, and wished them a good evening. I walked downstairs to the lobby to wait for him, he was there right at 6:00 pm.

“Hey, Will, good to see you,” Ian said. “You right to go? The car’s just outside.”

I followed him out to his car, Shane was in the passenger seat, and I got in the back. On the drive to the restaurant at the Weston Creek centre, I filled them in about today’s meeting, some of the things that were discussed, and what was planned for tomorrow. The restaurant was interesting, it was a buffet style pasta restaurant, we selected the style of pasta we wanted, the sauce, and the filling – beef, chicken, seafood. Ian reminded me that it was a ‘all you can eat’ place, but to leave room for dessert. With our plates filled, we sat down at the table.

“What’s this that Mum was telling me about you, Lori, Megan, and Michelle getting married the other weekend?” Ian asked. “I mean; you can’t get married to more than one person at a time ... what’s the real story? Was she confused?”

“No, she was right,” I said. “Well, when I say ‘married’, it obviously wasn’t a legal wedding, four people can’t marry each other, not the way we did. But it was more a way to express our love, our commitment to each other. The vows, the promises we made to each other were the same as if it was a legitimate marriage, without the ‘one person’ limitation, of course.”

“Well, why am I not surprised,” he said. “You’ve never been one to follow society’s rules, but Mum said you are all very happy, which I guess is the main point, so if you are happy with the arrangements, then I – we – are happy for all of you.”

“True,” I said. “How are the kids, what are they doing tonight?”

“Simon – he’s really into the Scouts, they are at a weekend camp at the Cotter River, and Sally is around at a friend’s place for a sleepover,” Shane said. “They are growing up so fast, I guess you’ll be at your parent’s place on Christmas day. They are looking forward to seeing their Uncle Will. I’ll have to work out how to explain the three new aunties thought. What was it your mother was talking about a Christmas Eve carol service?”

“That’s on at the church I go to, in Birchgrove, we are having a special carol service, starting at 9:00 pm,” I said. “You know Megan is the choir director, and your sister sings in it, too, Shane. We’d love all of you to come, I think my parents, and Leslie, David and their kids will be there, too.”

“It might be fun,” Ian said. “I guess you are singing, too? Are you playing the organ?”

“Singing, yes; organ, no,” I replied. “But I will play the piano for some of the carols.”

“What’s it like being back at the University, Will?” Shane asked me.

I gave them a summary of all the work that was required to get things working properly there, how we were revamping the course and subjects, and making changes to the structure of the school. This discussion continued until we were had finished our main meal, and the waiter / owner came over to our table.

“Charlie, this is my brother, Will Morris,” Ian said to him. “He’s down here for a day or two, and we decided to treat him to your desserts.”

“Oh, the famous rock star, I thought I recognized him,” Charlie said – a very gay Charlie. “I hope you left room for dessert, our New York cheesecake is orgasmic!” he said, drawing out the last word.

“Well, after that, I think I will have to try the cheesecake,” I said.

The cheesecake was even better than advertised, I could not recall ever having a smoother, richer, and creamier cheesecake in my life, it was pure bliss eating it. I was almost tempted to get a second helping of dessert, but I decided that would be too much. We paid our bill and went back to Ian and Shane’s place in Stirling, they showed me the new deck that had been built on the side, with sliding doors from the dining room and their bedroom leading out onto it.

“This looks ideal for barbeques and parties,” I said. “It really adds to the house.”

“We’ve already had a few decent parties out there,” Ian said. “The steps lead down to the barbie, and it’s easy to pass food from the kitchen through the windows. We’ve had about twenty people out here, there’s plenty of room to sit.”

Since it was a pleasant evening, we sat out on the table on the deck, drinking coffee and talking, until it was time for Ian to take me back to my hotel.

“Your place is looking pretty good, Ian,” I said to him as we pulled out of the suburb onto the main road. “It seems to be in a nice part of town, close to where the shops are, but the street seems quiet.”

“Yeah, we like it there,” he replied. “It’s close to the kid’s school, and where Shane teaches, too. Nice neighbours, it’s quiet, but close to everything. I’m looking forward to seeing this new place of yours, Dad has been telling me all about it, how you restored a whole row of terraces, and you have one for yourself.”

“When you are up at Christmas, and you come for the Christmas Eve service, you’ll see the house,” I said. “I like it, in fact, the Balmain area is a pretty neat part of the city to live in.”

“I can imagine, I bet you are so close to shops, you probably don’t need to drive to do things like that.”

“There are plenty of shops, restaurants, cafes, all of that within walking distance,” I said. “Just up at the main street, Darling Street, maybe fifty metres, there’s a regular bus service into the city, or I can walk fifteen minutes to a ferry wharf, take a ferry into the city. Of course, for me driving to work at the university is the only practical option, Michelle and I go in my car. Lori drives into her office in the city, and Megan works from home some days in our studio, or she’s at the rehearsal space in Surry Hills.”

“All sounds pretty good, I’m looking forward to seeing your place,” he said. “And hearing you singing the Christmas Carols, I’ve told the kids about that, and they are pretty excited to go to that service.”

He had me back at my hotel in a few minutes, and I thanked him for the enjoyable evening. Back in my room, I took a shower, called back home to let them know I was in my room after an enjoyable meal with Ian and Shane, and went to sleep.

I slept well, and after an enjoyable breakfast, I got ready for the morning’s session. Paul had said we wanted to talk about immigration and refugee policies. Before I headed down to the meeting, I read through my notes and the financial figures that showed how successful the various camps had been. This would form the basis of our response to any proposal from the Liberal Party to close down the camps and processing centres; they were of substantial economic benefit to the areas where they were located.

In the actual meeting, much of the discussion concentrated on ways to change the narrative; the previous government had concentrated on ‘illegal immigrants bypassing the system, flaunting the laws, and cutting in line’. I suggested that there were two things we needed to stress; firstly, that they were – or could well qualify – as refugees under international law, conventions that Australia was a signatory too. If we no longer wanted to be part of the international refugee resettlement program, then we should be up-front, and withdraw from the convention. But until we did withdraw from it, we were bound by the obligations that being a member of that involved. But with over ten million refugees, at least as counted by the UNHCR, that wouldn’t show Australia in a particularly good light.

“We are seen as a peaceful democracy, a wealthy country with plenty of resources,” I said. “What message are we sending to the rest of the world when we say, in effect, that we don’t care about the less fortunate, those who are escaping war, disaster, poverty, trying to make a better life for themselves? Are we so selfish that we couldn’t be bothered to help when we can? That’s the message that we need to tell about John Howard and his coterie of hard-hearted bigots. They don’t want to do anything that might upset their comfortable way of life; particularly anyone from non-European countries.”

“Will makes a very good point,” Anthony said. “We are not just looking to publicise our policies, but to show why what we propose is the right approach, why helping these refugees is ‘the Australian way’, and lines up with our values as a nation.”

“We can’t be seen as turning our backs on people in need,” Kevin Rudd said. “That’s not who we are as a people, that’s not the way we want to see ourselves. John Howard preaches a line on how ‘Australia is a Christian, caring country’, but his actions show that to be a lie.”

“I agree with Will,” Paul said. “It’s not just that we need to push our policies, but we need to show why the previous government’s policies were wrong, and contrary to how we should behave as a civilized, caring society. It’s not enough to say we have the right policies, but also show how wrong our opponents are. That way, it’s more than having them wanting to support us, but making them dislike, even hate the Liberal’s policies and positions. The more we can paint them as being ‘unAustralian’, the better it is for us. I don’t want to just win this election, but to crush Howard and the Liberals.”

By the time we finished the session, just around 11:00, we had thrashed out our policies, I felt that it had been a productive two days. I thanked Paul and the others for the opportunity to participate, and he took me to one side.

“Will, you are the one who needs to be thanked for your contributions,” he said. “You have a way of putting things, of stating what policies should be, that make it so obvious, you express things in a way that taking any other approach would be antithetical to our party’s history and values. It was you – digging up those message documents from the Navy – that brought Howard and his government down, I don’t want to know how you got them, or who gave them to you – but without your involvement, we wouldn’t be in the position to take over the government after the election. You are one of the party’s heroes, even if you don’t realize it. We all owe you a huge debt of gratitude.”

“Well, that’s maybe a bit over the top,” I said. “My reward will be seeing Howard in opposition, just defeat the bastard!”

“Working on it, Will, working on it!” he replied. “Have a safe trip back home, I’ll catch up with you Monday. The policy release, the campaign launch is Wednesday evening at the Bankstown RSL Club, I’ll get you some tickets, if you want. Four tickets?”

“Yeah, four tickets, we would love to be there,” I said. “Let me know the time, and any other details. I’ll see you there, Comrade, all the best.”

I had already packed my overnight bag and checked out of the room, so all I had to do was walk up Wentworth Avenue to the station and wait for my train to depart. I settled into my seat in the first class carriage, we left Canberra on time at noon, stopped at Queanbeyan for the three car set from Cooma to be attached, and then proceeded back to Sydney. The trip home was uneventful, around 2pm - as the train was passing through Mittagong, I got a coffee and a pastry from the buffet, and apart from that, I sat and enjoyed the passing scenery. Not long after we passed through Mittagong there was a brief downpour, it didn’t last all that long, and by the time we were passing through Picton, the skies were clear and blue again.