Gray: the growling genius
While we may not have always seen eye-to-eye, I couldn’t help but admire our former premier’s political astuteness, writes
IT’S not often that an 80year-old spud farmer writes a political autobiography. Which is why I rang farmer Gray on his 400-acre property at Scottsdale this week.
No answer.
I didn’t leave a message, but about 20 minutes later the farmer rang back. I could have checked if the incoming number matched my last call.
But why would I need to? It was Farmer Gray, aka Growler Gray, aka the Whispering Bulldozer.
“Hello, sorry I missed your phone call.”
Down the phone came the unmistakeable, gravelly grumble of one of the most forceful and politically astute premiers this state has ever had.
Before the lefties start bashing the keyboard, that fulsome praise certainly doesn’t mean when I dealt with him as a young television reporter back in the 80s that I agreed with everything he said.
I got to know him reasonably well, and he never much cared that my reporting from the Franklin River didn’t suit his argument to dam that “leech-ridden ditch”.
The pictures of the sublime beauty of the river which I sent back to the mainland played well with the ABC’s Sydney and Melbourne middle-class viewers.
They were my audience, but they were certainly not his electorate.
Robin Gray was first and foremost a Tasmanian populist, and his political genius was to outplay Labor at its own game. “I’m more pro-Labor than they are,” he once growled at me. “That’s why they hate me so much.”
He writes of his victory in the 1982 election: “It was beyond question that our vote was boosted by a large segment of blue-collar workers and their families who voted Liberal for the first time in their lives, correctly believing that the Liberals were united in our commitment to build the dam.”
Gray understood the insecurity blue collar workers were feeling as the changing world of globalisation shrank Tasmania’s traditional industrial base.
Textile mills and manufacturing industries had left the state, and Labor had presided over the decline. Now Gray was going to turn the tide with a dam on the Franklin.
Not just the man of the moment but the man of the future, apparently: “This was decades before environmentalism and carbon debates generated calls for more focus on renewable energy sources.”
“Gray was a force of nature,” says former Labor politician Terry Aulich. He was elected to the seat of Wilmot (now Lyons) in 1976, the same year as Gray, whom he described as, “a hard working populist who taught the Liberal Party how to win by targeting Labor’s traditional hold on the blue collar vote. Workers could see conservationist groups threatening their livelihoods and Robin played it like a rock musician”.
I remember Gray’s rock star act when he donned the boxing gloves in Queenstown and mugged for the television camera. I must admit someone in the crowd handed me the gloves and asked me to give them to the Premier.
But no harm done, it was good television, and the Franklin still flows free.
In fact, the river is one of our biggest tourist attractions. And always will be, so long as tourists can get there.
Gray’s book “Proud to be Tasmanian” is self-published, with the help of his former chief of staff, the crafty Andrew Tilt, a one-time Tasmanian political journalist who was so good as an adviser protecting and advancing the Premier that he was not much liked among journalists.
Tilt says the book has come late to redress a significant “gap” in Tasmania’s historical record. Apart from the outstanding “Electric Eric” biography (by Jillian Koshin), there has not been much leading up to and even since the 1970-80s period … and certainly not through a former premier as the original source,” he said.
Scribes who still haven’t forgiven Andrew Tilt’s notorious cunning as a political operative might at least thank him for encouraging Gray to write an account, sometimes a little painstakingly detailed, of a period in the state’s history which is already slipping from memory.
Certainly “Proud to be Tasmanian” has a place on the bookshelves of anyone interested in the turbulent Gray years, and in the bribery royal commission which ended them. Gray continues to deny any impropriety or involvement in political bribery.
He records that, “the shock, incredulity and the utter amazement of the whole Tasmanian community [myself included] to this revelation cannot be underestimated”.
Interestingly, in the book’s introduction, Neil Batt, a former Labor opposition leader, still maintains Gray’s innocence in the matter of Tasmanian media mogul Edmund Rouse’s attempted bribery of an ALP member of parliament.
Given the scandal has been the darkest cloud over Gray’s political career, Batt’s words are like a benediction: “My belief was that the purpose of the royal commission was to taint Gray, and I continue to believe … that the allegations against him were completely unfounded, not in line with his character, nor comprehensible as being in his interest.”
Of course, there is not a Tasmanian political biography ever written that does not serve the author’s self-interest, except perhaps Bob Cheek’s classic, the hilarious and selfdeprecating “Confessions of a Ferret Salesman”.
Though it is often the case that political autobiographies can jog memories of things that never made it to print.
I remember after the premier had performed his boxing routine in Queenstown, having stirred an already raucous and resentful crowd to a point where the media thought it was time to leave.
Robin growled in my ear. “Charles, you blokes in the media don’t want the dam, which you all know is the only work here. Do you really want that noisy mob to move over the mountains and live near you in Hobart?”
ROBIN GROWLED IN MY EAR. CHARLES, YOU BLOKES IN THE MEDIA DON’T WANT THE DAM, WHICH YOU ALL KNOW IS THE ONLY WORK HERE. DO YOU REALLY WANT THAT NOISY MOB TO MOVE OVER THE MOUNTAINS AND LIVE NEAR YOU IN HOBART?