Damien Murphy, “Paddy’s back on Broadway,”
The Bulletin, November 22, 1994, pp. 46-47.
Damien Murphy profiles the journalist so many love to hate to read, P. P. McGuinness, now back at Fairfax and lambasting readers in his inimitable style
Serious newspapers nowadays are littered with more columns than the Parthenon. In times of change and deep confusion, opinion can be mistaken for wisdom and Australia’s most successful columnists are the ones whose writings and rantings are the most opinionated of all.
Point man among this elite group is P. P. McGuinness. Each week, in a lonely and gargantuan high-wire act, he writes five 1200-word columns which are shoehorned into the Fairfax broadsheets, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
Other leading columnists rarely venture beyond economics, finance or politics, but McGuinness’s free-range pontificating embraces ideology, sociology — whatever takes his fancy. Such a Herculean task makes the writing less than elegant. But pamphleteering is based on ideas, not style — McGuinness is the paid agent provocateur whose worth is measured by letters to the editor.
McGuinness’s most loyal followers may well be left-leaning readers who like a little masochism with breakfast. A sort of intellectual cattle prod and remembered as an orotund figure of the Left, McGuinness spends a lot of time baiting them: recent columns show him supporting whaling, opposing unions, attacking the ABC and Labor’s move for more women in politics; occasionally, he lambasts Alexander Downer or Jeff Kennett.
McGuinness admits that he stirs: “There’s not much point in being a journalist if nobody reads you,” he says. “When I was a student, I was bloody radical; I was in every demonstration and the people who now call me conservative are the tame little ones who sat at home in the suburbs.”
But he refuses to be categorised, saying tags are meaningless in current political terms. Still, there are very few Left columnists in Australia. McGuinness says it is because there are no Left thinkers. Maybe the Right is too easy a target. Either way, the prevailing cornucopia of conservative writers suggests attacking the Left brings more kudos and riches.
Awesome: McGuinness was reportedly offered a package worth nearly $400,000 to leave Rupert Murdoch’s local flagship, The Australian, and rejoin Fairfax last August. While not an undue sum compared with incomes of top doctors, lawyers and television newsreaders (people McGuinness clearly feels superior to), it is an awesome achievement within print journalism where $50,000 is a senior writing wage and celebrity opinion is increasingly valued over reportage.
After Stuart Littlemore made unkind observations about McGuinness’s remuneration package, he attacked the ABC TV Media Watch program host in his column last month. He subsequently rejected an offer by The Bulletin to set the record straight and put Littlemore in his place. “The point is he made no attempt even to check, he just went on rumour,” McGuinness claims.
Flirtations: Some columnists admit youthful flirtations with leftish ideology, but McGuinness donned the whole mantle and, although no longer a voter, says he continues to attack the Establishment — only now for him, ironically, the Establishment is the Left.
How did Padraic Pearse McGuinness get to such a tortured and isolated place? Born in 1938, his fifth-generation Australian parents still wore the green, naming him in honour of the poet executed after the Easter uprising in Dublin 22 years before. His mother, Elsie, daughter of a Sydney clerk, was lace-curtain Irish; his father, Frank, off a Mallee farm, was more brewery Irish, and also a journalist.
There were two schools of journalism during Frank McGuinness’s working life: the English kind hoarded words like misers, the Irish spent them like drunken wastrels. Firmly rooted in the Celtic tradition, the elder McGuinness became such a towering figure that 20 years after his death cadet journalists on the Melbourne Herald were regaled with his legend: sacked for decking his Geelong Advertiser editor; the first journalist found guilty of contempt over protection of sources; the booze, the women.
Along the way, McGuinness edited Ezra Norton’s Melbourne newspaper, The Truth, before moving north to start the Daily Mirror. He dropped dead at a Sydney bus stop in 1949.
His brother back at Swan Hill paid for their 11-year-old, fatherless nephew’s education at Riverview College in Sydney. But four years too old to fit the Jesuit maxim (“Give me the boy at seven …”), P. P. McGuinness never really became a bishop’s boy. When drought meant the Mallee uncles could no longer pay the fees, he eschewed Jesuit charity and took himself off to Sydney Boys’ High School, quit Catholicism, then opted out of Christianity; he is now an atheist who plans resisting a death-bed recantation. “The way the Catholic Church is going, it may die before I do,” McGuinness says.
Yet he assiduously waters the dry earth of his Irish and Jesuit past. A shy but theatrical man with a penchant for black clothes — a habit acquired, he claims, long before Phillip Adams cut his image from the same cloth — McGuinness drolly maintains that the garb combines the colour of confessor, anarchist and existentialist, while taking the worry out of what to wear.
He also plays the boyo, but cultural Irishness can be a hard thing to doff: his daughter’s name honours another failed Irish leader, Parnell. “There is that certain Irish tradition of rejection of the Establishment,” he allows, “which is quite a valuable tradition provided it doesn’t become just self-indulgent … well, it always does.”
Finishing school in 1955, McGuinness embraced much that chafed in the Menzies comfort-zone of the era. He hung out with The Push in Sydney, courtesy of his brother, Michael (a former mathematics teacher at Sydney Grammar School) and sister, Judith (then a member of the Communist Party of Australia), teetered towards anarchism, then Communism, but joined the ALP, took an economics degree at Sydney University in 1960, tutored, odd-jobbed and sailed for Europe in May 1963.
The Australia he left McGuinness recalls as stultifying, but in retrospect he reckons that, apart from the young and dissident, the 1950s were a pretty good time for all. “The ’50s were more exciting than the ’60s,” he says. “And that upsets the babyboomers. If you look at the ’50s, that was when the ideas that formed the ’60s were first bubbling up. To revolt against the Establishment in the ’50s meant you were in a tiny minority and you really were in revolt against the Establishment, not effectively creating a new one as the babyboomers did.”
McGuinness spent much of the “swinging London” period with the KGB-front Moscow Narodny Bank, mainly in foreign exchange, completed a Masters at the London School of Economics, became the first Australian to work for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and taught. In May 1968, Paddy the Red rode a bike into a strike-hit Paris and watched the people, under student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit, stop the city. “It was electric,” McGuinness recalls.
Dreary: Back home in 1971, it was as dreary was ever. “When I came back to Australia, I found all these people who thought that the biggest thing in life was a Vietnam moratorium rally. I’d been in the middle of all this stuff for years in Paris and London, and looked at them and thought, ‘You’re having yourselves on’.”
McGuinness wrote on economics for The Australian Financial Review, becoming an economic advisor to Bill Hayden in the first Whitlam government. Fellow apparatchiks remember McGuinness’s gleeful delight in hammering doctors who resisted Medicare, and his almost pathological detestation of treasurer Jim Cairns.
McGuinness left the Whitlam government after only 15 months, blaming a bad relationship with treasury head John Stone and saying that Hayden, as new treasurer, needed the bureaucrats on side.
It also dawned on McGuinness that, in a theme that reverberates through his columns, the “middle-class lefties were starting to get their snouts in the trough”.
Notoriety: Rejoining the Financial Review as economics editor, he also resumed his career as a film critic on The National Times. McGuinness became editor of the Financial Review in 1980, editor-in-chief in February 1982 and by April scored national notoriety by declaring Australia had entered a recession and was in imminent danger of a “genuine depression”, all over his front page. The stricken Fraser government attacked McGuinness’s qualifications and intentions but he haughtily dismissed criticisms, proclaiming that nobody in Australian journalism had his depth or training. “I was right; I picked it exactly,” he says, 12 years later.
Then to France, where he was cocooned from much of the Gordon Gecko era of Australian financial journalism. When he did return, it was to write columns for five years on The Australian as it strove for broadsheet pre-eminence. Now he is back on Broadway, the Sydney home of Fairfax.
Having spent much of his career preaching to the converted in the business and conservative press, can McGuinness’s didactic style work with a breezier readership? He believes they no longer matter; McGuinness says that chattering classes of Balmain (his home turf), Carlton and Fitzroy may think they represent community feelings but are out of touch, smug and irrelevant.
“The per capita circulation of quality papers has been declining steadily for the past 20 years,” he says. “These people who identify themselves with an antipodean Guardian don’t buy the bloody thing. Look at Max Suich’s struggle with The Independent Monthly — the middle class is too mean to pay five bucks for a magazine.”
