Book Review:
Father of the House: The Memoirs of Kim E Beazley.
Introduction by Kim C Beazley.
Available from Fremantle Press.
RRP $27.95.
Reviewed by John Farquharson
It is not easy to live up to Christian principles and survive in the rough and tumble of the Australian Parliament. Kim Edward Beazley, who served in the Federal Parliament for 32 years, showed it can be done.
His service spanned the years 1945 to 1977, wilderness years for the Labor Party which was rent by squabbling. All but five of his years in Parliament were served in opposition. Yet he achieved much from the opposition benches.
Beazley won the seat of Fremantle following the death of Prime Minister John Curtin. He was 27 years old. His remarkable story is told in this memoir, with annotations by his son, the former Labor Party leader, Kim C Beazley, and by John Bond.
His first years in Parliament were not auspicious. Alan Reid, doyen of the Parliamentary journalists at the time, wrote, “Beazley entered Parliament armed with the broadsword of idealism and reforming zeal, only to slow to a trot in the mire of parliamentary cynicism. Confident of his own superiority, moral and mental, he lectured the Parliament in a hectoring, sneering tone, which earned him the sobriquet, ‘The Student Prince’, and almost universal dislike”.
Then in 1953 Beazley was chosen as a representative of his Party at the Queen’s coronation. Before returning to Australia, he visited Caux, Switzerland, where a Moral Re-Armament conference was taking place. A sincere Christian and a member of the Anglican church, Beazley’s religious convictions were strengthened by what he found there.
He returned to Australia having decided to “concern myself daily with the challenge of how to live out God’s will”. As he puts it, “to turn the searchlight of absolute honesty on to my motives. To try to see the world with the clarity of absolute purity. To take absolute love as radar through the fog of international affairs”.
One discipline he adopted was to take time in quiet each morning, before the distractions of the day, and ask God, “to speak to my thoughts, write them down and test them by Christ’s standards of absolute honesty, purity, unselfishness and love”, then to carry out actions that met those standards.
At that time I was a journalist in the Parliamentary Press Gallery and witnessed the change in him. The “lecturing and superiority” went out of his manner of speaking in Parliament.
He found a new respect for his Parliamentary colleagues and, he writes, in his conversations with them there was “often a depth and reality unknown to me in the past”.
However, his views began to alarm some of his party leaders. As Alan Reid wrote, ‘Truth is always an uncomfortable neighbour in politics and Beazley was recognised as a danger to Labor obtaining office. So the word has gone out, destroy him – he is off-balance. Though it is fashionable to profess Christianity, it is remarkably easy to persuade those who live in the materialistic atmosphere of Australian politics that any man who attempts to apply too rigidly the Christian beliefs of his private life must be unstable.”
But they did not destroy him. The turbulence of West Australian Labor politics saw him three times threatened with expulsion from the Party. But he was always preselected in the ballot of thousands of Labor Party members which chose their candidates. Gradually, over the years, his stance won acceptance and grudging respect, even admiration in some cases.
In this, Beazley saw himself as true to Labor tradition: ‘The British Labour Party was born of radical Christianity. The movement was nourished in the seedbed of the early Methodist chapels, where working men could find a quality of moral straightness that gave them great authority…. Keir Hardie, the Scottish miner who founded the British Labour Party and became its first Member of Parliament, said that “the inspiration which has carried me on has derived more from the teachings of Jesus than all the other sources combined.”’
Beazley himself hoped to be remembered for two issues. Firstly, his work to enhance the lives of Australia’s Aboriginal people.
He put Aboriginal land rights onto the Labor Party platform in 1952, and thereafter worked steadily to expose and end discrimination against the Aboriginal community.
When he became Minister for Education in 1972, he introduced bilingual education for Aboriginal children, and soon Aboriginal children were being taught in 22 Aboriginal languages.
Secondly, he developed the policy reforms which changed the landscape of Australian education. When the Australian National University awarded him an honorary doctorate, it stated: ‘Mr Beazley’s greatest contribution was the healing of an ulcer that has festered in our society for close on 200 years. Sectarian bitterness, which focused on school funding, was dealt a death blow by needs-based funding which Mr Beazley introduced.’
Beazley writes that he had ‘a clear underlying aim in the education portfolio: that the needs of every child should be met – children in state schools and private schools, gifted children and handicapped, wealthy children and poor. As a Christian, no lesser aim made any sense. It was the Pole Star by which I tried to guide education policy. Nobody has ever met the needs of all children, but the aim was a good navigational point.’
Bob Hawke said that Beazley was a better intellect and a better orator than Whitlam, and regretted that he had never led the Party.
But Beazley had other priorities.
As he writes of his years in Parliament, ‘I learnt that the key to social advance is not power but conscience. All social advance depends on making the conscience more sensitive.’ He made his contribution to sensitising Australia’s conscience, and was content with that.