Three Paddy McGuinness articles exploring the concept of leadership:
1. On wanting it rather than doing it: untitled “McGuinness” column, The Weekend Australian, March 3-4, 1990, p. 2.
2. On wanting it without defining it: “Follow the leader is a silly game,” The Australian, October 11, 1991, p. 11.
3. On wanting it, getting it, regretting it: “Beware wishing for a strong leader — you might get him,” The Australian, September 11, 1992, p. 13.

1.
Padraic P. McGuinness, untitled “McGuinness” column,
The Weekend Australian, March 3-4, 1990, p. 2.

The Business Council debt summit in Melbourne last Thursday and yesterday could well prove to have been the most important event in the course of the election campaign, even though it was not intended to be.

Indeed, with a bit of luck, it could prove to be of much more importance than the outcome of the election. As things are at the moment it does not matter which of the major parties wins the election; but what does matter is that the Australian community generally and the business community in particular should start to realise just how precarious is our position in the international economy.

It is not that anything especially new came up at the summit conference — aptly named, since it included some 300 people, among them the top executives of most of Australia’s major corporations. That in itself was remarkable, since such a gathering has not taken place at all in the past in such a public fashion. And what they were being told, and telling themselves, was that they were not doing their jobs properly.

There is a standard phrase in the business world which really is an abdication of responsibility. “Leadership,” they say, “what we need is strong leadership.” Well, the truth is that they are the leaders, and they have not been giving it for the most part either to their own companies or to the Australian economy. Of course now they are getting some leadership from the Business Council of Australia — and the message is that no matter what the various problems with taxation, unions, unfair trading practices by other countries, high interest rates and the low savings rate of the Australian population, the real responsibility for our dangerously high international indebtedness is in the failure of performance of our corporations as exporters.

Not only the future of Australia, but the future of every significant business enterprise in this country, is bound up in the improvement of competitiveness and international marketing which must take place if Australia is to keep place [pace?] with the rest of the world. This is now realised in principle by most of our corporate chief executives. But the real issue is whether they are able to communicate that message to their middle-level managements, and to the unions and the workforce with which they must deal.

It is not just a matter of managements operating directly in the exporting and import-competing sectors, either. For growth in Australian living standards and hence in the market for all Australian corporations, and for all Australian producers of goods and services from teachers to builders’ labourers, is going to depend on the success of the tradeable goods and services industries.

The oft-expressed complaint from the unions that management expects wage restraint from them while not exercising it itself has some justification. The common system of paying top management high salaries which are hardly affected by their success or failure cannot be justified. Corporate executives who do succeed deserve very high rewards — but those who fail deserve little more than the basic wage. It can be seen most clearly with respect to the State Bank of Victoria — most of the top executives of that bank now are shown to have been not worth feeding. Yet they have taken high salaries, and they will be required to repay nothing. Not even their superannuation.

If their salaries had been linked to performance, they would be poor men. This is the typical situation with public sector organisations, where there are low rewards for performance and very few penalties for failure — what happened to the people who wasted many millions of dollars of the public’s money in the Redfern mail exchange in Sydney, still being painfully torn down bit by bit? Not one was sacked.

However, it is also all too common in the private sector. Corporate executives demand and get high salaries — but there are few penalties for failure. Those that exist are for spectacular failure rather than sheer conservatism. (Remember the advertising slogan, “no one ever got sacked for buying IBM”.)

Yet the failure of Australia’s corporate ethos, the similarity between the management structures of the private sector and the public sector, is still only gradually being realised. Dr Kenichi Onmae of McKinsey in Japan shocked a few people by pointing out that the reason for Japan’s economic success had little if anything to do with government sponsorship, but that it sprang from cut-throat competition. There used to be almost 300 motorcycle manufacturers in Japan — now there are four, not because of government policy or monopolistic activity, but because these are the survivors. And they are not surprisingly very strong, very efficient, very good at getting and holding on to markets.

The debt summit got off to a pretty good start with a speech by Professor Geoffrey Blainey, Australia’s leading historian (as distinct from the historical fiction writers). Blainey’s speciality is, of course, economic history, and he put the present debt situation into the context of the two great crises of Australia’s past history — the 1890s and the 1930s. We are not yet over the brink of such a catastrophe, he pointed out, but we are near the brink — and the cost of not drawing back from it would be on the historical record, immense.

I have often thought that any management education course ought to include a solid dose of economic history, or perhaps the history of past economic and financial collapses, swindles, confidence tricks, disastrous takeovers and speculative bubbles. Of course no management school teaches such a course, any more than does any history course. Perhaps the essential subject in any managerial, economic, political or social education ought to be entitled “What went wrong, and why we got it wrong”.

So at least the Business Council got one thing right this time: they started with a history lesson. It is a history lesson which was reprinted by several newspapers, including The Australian — and it ought to be read in every class in every school, university and business course. What it teaches is that just about every issue which has been debated, argued over, dissected by the Canberra Press gallery and held out as traps for unwary politicians is a red herring, except the issue of our trading situation and our growing international debt. Yet this is not the central issue of the election campaign. Both parties are desperately trying to avoid it.

And of the minor parties, the Australian Democrats have not even realised that there is a problem — they continue to peddle snake oil and, as Blainey put it, “an earnest promise of economic decline.”

So it is pretty clear that the solution to our economic problems is not going to come from any of the politicians. Nor, really, could it — so accustomed are Australians to demanding that the government “do something” that they forget that governments can do very little positive, and their main function is getting in the way of people who can do things, and generally messing things up.

If the debt summit has managed to teach our corporate executives that they have to stop asking for leadership and be leaders it will have achieved more than any change of government.

***
2.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Follow the leader is a silly game,”
The Australian, October 11, 1991, p. 11.

“Of a good leader, they say — We did this ourselves.” So goes a Chinese saying which I noted so long ago that I have forgotten the name of the author. Perhaps it was Sun-Tzu.

But it has always seemed to me a much more profound comment about leadership than all the hypocritical nonsense churned out by businessmen, preachers, schoolmasters and their ilk about the need for leadership in our society. Of course, all the political rhetoric about the need for leadership to save us from our political, social and economic problems is an excuse for inability to think about the real problems.

For some reason it is business which is the worst source of this. Always there is the sustained whinge about inadequate leadership and the need for leadership to get us out of our difficulties. But what do they really want? Essentially they are yearning for the “man on horseback” who will relieve us all from the inconveniences of thinking for ourselves and solving problems through elaborate, confusing, but very necessary processes of democracy and compromise.

Of course if business really believed in leadership we would have more presentable business leaders. However it is only necessary to turn on the Channel 9 business program on Sunday morning (and even better in former days, the very much lamented Channel 10 program which Max Walsh used to run) to judge our top business leaders. It is a great thing, insufficiently appreciated, that top business leaders can be exposed to the public view in this way.

Unfortunately, the result is that we can realise what an unimpressive lot, with only a few exceptions, they are. These are the people who are paid huge amounts of money to be leaders — and for the most part they are relatively uneducated and unsophisticated and their political ideas go no further than prattling about the need for leadership which they themselves are paid handsomely to provide.

Not that there is much to be said for leadership. It is usually a matter of self-promoters who glory in attention conning other people in the community into following them in ill-considered and ill-analysed proposals to do something — justified or not. The qualities of leadership when apparent in a school child are usually those which ensure that the school captain or whatever will be a vain failure in adult life. The qualities of leadership in a politician, according to popular judgement, are merely the ability to present petty ambition as glamorous. In military leaders and charismatic leaders in the past it has usually been the quality which persuades countries to embark upon mass slaughter or starvation.

It was not for nothing that Hitler was called Der Fuhrer (leader) and Mussolini Il Duce (leader), or that similar titles were endowed upon Stalin and Mao Tse-tung. Mass murderers have always been great leaders.

In fact, the last thing Australia needs is leadership. Self-reliance and a willingness to get on with whatever people are paid to do and to do it well, would be a lot better. Yet a market research firm has seen fit to conduct a poll about how people evaluate the “leadership” qualities of Messrs Hawke, Keating and Hewson. The English novelist Henry Fielding once wrote a satirical novel whose hero, Jonathan Wild, ended his life on the gallows, the measure of his fame being the amount of harm he had managed to perpetrate in his lifetime. A true leader of men.

It is all a matter of image and projection. To evaluate the relative “leadership” qualities of these gentlemen would require a lot more than an opinion poll.

Thus when people are asked to rate Hawke and Keating as “capable and intelligent”, what are they judging other than the television performance of the two men? Some people would even rate TV newsreaders high on these criteria, whereas by definition if the person actually had these qualities he or she would not be doing that job. Despite long knowledge of the performance of both men, and many conversations with people (especially bureaucrats) who deal with them, I would find it hard to rate one better or worse than the other? By what criteria? After all, Hawke has passed university exams, been a successful advocate for the ACTU and run that unruly organisation successfully for a total of 20 years, and been an effective Prime Minister for eight years. What has Keating achieved in comparison?

The same applies to the criterion “decisive and gets things done”. Well, Hawke successfully deposed his predecessor as a result of a ruthless conspiracy. Keating hasn’t got that done yet.

“Clarity of policy”: I wonder what people are talking about. We know that the Government has great difficulty making up its mind, and had when Keating was treasurer, but it did come up with reasonably clear policies on many things. Possibly the murkiest areas were those over which Paul Keating presided, such as foreign investment policy, offshore tax havens, tax trade-offs with the ACTU — which required plunging Australian into recession — and the like. Now that he is in opposition, Mr Keating has no policies of any clarity whatsoever. What can people be thinking of, unless they consider mindless ambition to be a policy?

“Understanding of the economy”: my case rests. It only needs to be added that anyone who can, like Keating, indulge in old-fashioned rhetoric about the levers of economic policy and believes in short-term fine-tuning of the economy, must understand the economy even less than R.J.L. Hawke.

“Clear plans for improving living conditions”: on this I might be inclined to rate Keating higher than Hawke, since he certainly was a strong supporter of micro-economic reform and sponsored much of the good work of the Industry Commission which points to the ways to achieve higher living standards. But dealing with Wally Curran and the meatworkers in Victoria? That is a clear plan for not only creating unemployment among meatworkers but also increasing the price of meat and harming our meat exporters. Bob Hawke was more credible when he said that no child need live in poverty; it was not his fault that the unions thought otherwise.

“Supports medium/small business”: well, Hawke does not patronise antique shops. Otherwise there is no perceptible difference.

“Has a clear plan for improving the nation”. The mind boggles. I wish someone would tell me what the plans for action along these lines of either Hawke or Keating were. I have been interested in the subject for some time, and have noticed no ideas emanating from either, except for the cliché of micro-economic reform. Surely they can’t be talking about Keating’s disinterral of tired nostrums from the Whitlam era?

“Strong/forceful”: it depends how weak you yourself are, doesn’t it? Both men can trample over a seven-stone weakling; both give way before anyone who has the intestinal fortitude to stand up to them. I suppose if you are a kid in the press gallery, Keating looks fairly formidable, and if you are frightened of threats of defamation writs, Hawke could be quite scary.

Otherwise, the only criterion is performance. Hawke has been a successful Prime Minister for eight years; Keating was a moderately good treasurer for much of this period.

I have no quarrel with the survey but all it is really telling us is that Keating is a better con-man than Bob Hawke.

***
3.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Beware wishing for a strong leader — you might get him,” The Australian, September 11, 1992, p. 13.

Whenever you talk to business executives about the political situation or the state of the economy, they always come out with one word — leadership. Leadership is what this country needs most, they say.

Well, now they’ve got it, and they don’t like it. For if there is one thing which John Hewson, the Leader of the Opposition, is offering the business community it is leadership. And it turns out that they, especially in the big corporations, especially in the motor vehicle industry, don’t want decisive and clear leadership, offering firm policy directives, at all. What they want is a government and an opposition led by pliable politicians who will serve the business agenda, whether or not it makes sense or offers solutions.

We have of course two leaders on the political scene — the Prime Minister, Paul Keating, and John Hewson. Both are offering leadership of a kind. One is promising a fairly conservative and safe agenda of continuing the kind of government which was begun under the leadership of Bob Hawke, with the only difference being the increasingly desperate initiatives born of recession and the fear of defeat at the next elections. Conservative and fearful leadership, which will succumb to sectional pressures from business, is exactly the kind of leadership which the business community really likes.

This, of course, is not really what they will get from Keating. For in the unlikely event that he wins the next election, all of Keating’s arrogance and certainty of his own understanding of how the economy works and what is good for Australia will return. He certainly will not feel beholden to business for his victory, and he will have not the slightest hesitation in governing the country as he sees fit.

This might in itself not be a bad thing. Cronyism between the PM and the business community would exist, but not so blatantly as in the 80s, and most of Keating’s instincts with respect to economic policy are rational. He would only pay lip-service as at present to the current boof-headed protectionist outcry, while continuing the process of dismantling protection.

This would be tough luck for BHP and the car industry. They would get little for their help. A victorious Keating government would believe just as strongly as does John Hewson in the need for continued rapid structural change. But Keating knows that when it comes to politics, business executives are, for the most part, naïve and easily fooled.

So willy-nilly, our business community is going to get strong and determined leadership, whether it comes from Hewson or from Keating. And they won’t like it either way.

What upsets them, however, about Hewson, and it is the same thing which is upsetting the Canberra press gallery — currently engaged in one of its characteristic sheep-like rushes all in the same direction — is that they are at last realising that he is a genuine radical, who really does intend to accelerate change along the lines initiated by the Hawke government and who will allow various sacred cows like the Industrial Relations Commission to go to the knackel’s [?] instead of being put out to pasture to die peacefully. Moreover, he is not treating corporate barons with the respect and deference which they expect from Liberal leaders.

The behaviour of the press gallery is a more interesting and complex phenomenon. It is not a matter, of course, of general political bias against the Opposition. The gallery’s political views are on the whole quite diverse (and The Australian’s bureau is holding aloof to a considerable extent from the latest excesses). Special mention must of course be made of the ABC. Partly because it has concluded it is inevitable that a Coalition government would deliver the promised 10 per cent cut in funding and partly because it is naturally biased against the Coalition, the fury of the attack the ABC is mounting against Hewson is quite understandable. The ABC, too, has become the main preacher of more regulation, interventionism and protectionism, having no respect for rationality in any area, least of all economic policy.

The gallery as a whole is subject to a kind of mindless mob psychology, like a flock of sheep, wheeling and charging collectively off in a new direction at unpredictable intervals. The fashion it is pursuing this week (and Keating is a very effective sheep dog when it comes to the gallery) is that Hewson is too confrontationist, too abrasive, too ideological, too dogmatic, too determined to stick to the policy course laid down in the Fightback document. Many of them actually believe that there are cures for unemployment to be found in protectionism, and that something like our present car industry is somehow essential to the continuance of manufacturing industry.

So for one reason and another it is now the fashion to attack the Opposition for sticking to policies which is revealed, it will be remembered, after a continual chorus of cries of “when are you going to tell us your policies?”.

It is not surprising that there should be some mutterings in the Opposition party rooms which can be taken as the justification for the gallery behaving like a flock of enraged sheep. It has been obvious from the beginning that the goods and services tax was a high-risk policy — nowhere has it ever been introduced without controversy and discontent. The industrial relations policy of the Opposition differs in reality very little from what is actually already happening in many workplaces, except in that the Government will retain a role for the IRC as Bill Kelty’s private police force. But the shibboleth of the umpire is ingrained in a management culture which has grown up in fear and hatred of direct dealings with employees.

And of course when unemployment is rising, protectionism is always the first refuge for a politician with an industrial constituency, and it is the most time-honoured and fundamental of all Victorian political dogmas.

But these mutterings are in themselves not enough to explain the concerted onslaught on Hewson and the Opposition for espousing policies which are hardly different in principle, even if rather different in detail and emphasis, from those which have been espoused by the Government for most of its life.

There is nothing wrong at all in journalists hectoring and pestering politicians, exposing their inadequacies, evasions and shallowness, and analysing and criticising their policies. (And certainly Kerry O’Brien on the ABC Lateline program has ensured that Tim Fischer will never again submit to an extended grilling without doing his homework first.) All this is right and proper.

But it is decidedly peculiar, even fishy, when the gallery suddenly takes up a theme introduced by the Prime Minister and starts insisting that the Opposition leader should stop criticising, should accept government policies, should be helpful and bipartisan in his approach, should not be nasty and abusive along Keating lines, should praise with only faint damns the state of the economy and our immediate economic prospects and should generally subscribe to the notion that Paul Keating is really a wonderful leader and Prime Minister. What sort of country do they think they are living in?