Madam Mayor, Current and Former Councillors.

Members of the McMahon family.

Ladies and Gentlemen.

In 1866 in London, British politician William Ewart initiated a scheme to erect blue plaques as historical markers to connect people of historical significance to places where they lived and worked. The first commemorative Blue Plaque was unveiled in 1867 for Lord Byron at his birthplace.

Today, we unveil a plaque at the former home of Sir William and Lady McMahon at 18 Drumalbyn Road, Bellevue Hill to commemorate Sir William’s service.

The McMahon home, which stood on this site, was a Californian bungalow built around 1920. Sir William and Lady McMahon purchased it in 1968 for $172,000. It was sold by Lady McMahon in 2011 for $9 million.

I grew up in this area, and we would sometimes drive past the McMahons’ home. I remember my parents pointing it out and saying that a former Prime Minister lived there.

My parents were proud to have handed out how-to-vote cards for the Liberal Party when Bill McMahon was Prime Minister in 1972 and did not bear any responsibility for the Whitlam government, still the most chaotic government in our history.

Lady McMahon was a fixture at events in the Eastern Suburbs and remained glamorous to the end. When I served on Woollahra Council from 1995 to 1999, I was her local councillor. She then lived in Victoria Road. I remember the property well because it was the subject of a long-running dispute with her neighbour and the council.

In early 2002, I approached Lady McMahon about accessing Sir William’s papers in the National Library of Australia so I might write a biography of the only Australian Prime Minister not to be the subject of a proper full-length biography. I also felt history had been unfairly harsh on Bill McMahon whose long and significant parliamentary career was more interesting and substantial than his two years as Prime Minister. Even his years as Prime Minister were more substantial than those of many recent holders of that office.

Lady McMahon granted me special access to the McMahon papers – which were then otherwise sealed until 2008 – and I spent my holidays in 2002 as a young solicitor researching the McMahon biography in the manuscript reading room of the National Library of Australia. I should observe at that time the manuscript room was run by Dr Marie Louise Ayres. This month Marie Louise steps down as Director-General of the National Library of Australia (on whose council I served for six years as a representative of the House of Representatives). I want to honour her service.

The McMahon papers are one of the largest collections of papers in the library comprising 100 metres of boxes of documents and 612 boxes in total. I conducted some interviews with former colleagues who were still alive like Peter Hewson, Jim Forbes, Sir Harold Young and Len Bosman among others.

I wrote some op-eds about McMahon and his government, and the late John Nethercote suggested to the editors that I write the entry on McMahon for the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

Unfortunately, I never finished my work on the McMahon biography, and a not particularly sympathetic biography was written by Patrick Mullins ‘Tiberius with a telephone: the life and stories of William McMahon’.  The book not only details McMahon’s life but also his attempts to get an autobiography published. Mullins did not have access to the McMahon papers.

History has not been kind to Sir William McMahon as the Prime Minister who presided over the end of 23 years of Liberal Government. Historians and former colleagues have been critical of him.

What such criticism overlooks is the very substantial contribution he made to post-war Australia and that contribution deserves to be revisited on a day like today. Much of what follows derives from my entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography on Sir William McMahon that I wrote 7 years ago.

Sir William McMahon was born on 23 February 1908 at Redfern to William Daniel McMahon and his wife Mary Ellen Amelia Walder. The older McMahon was a lawyer.

After Bill’s mother’s death in 1917, he was raised by relatives and guardians, the most prominent among them his maternal uncle Sir Samuel Walder, who became Lord Mayor of Sydney in 1932.

Bill McMahon went to Abbotsholme College, Killara the same primary school as Harold Holt, and later Sydney Grammar School where he rowed in the first VIII.

McMahon’s father died in 1926 during his final year of school.

He studied law at St Paul’s College at the University of Sydney, graduating in 1933.

At university he was a boxer, a lover of ballet, the theatre, music and art, and keen on horse racing.

He was articled to the Sydney law firm Allen, Allen & Hemsley, where Sir Norman Cowper, a towering figure in the law and Sydney society, influenced his political thinking. From 1939 to 1941 he was a partner.

On 26 April 1940 McMahon was commissioned in the Citizen Military Forces. He transferred to the Australian Imperial Force in October. Employed on staff duties in Australia, he was classified medically unfit for overseas service because of chronic catarrh that impaired his hearing. He was promoted to captain in 1942 and major in 1943.

After making an extensive tour of Europe to observe the problems created by World War II, McMahon returned to the University of Sydney graduating with an economics degree in 1949.

In 1948 the great Sydney silk, Sir Jack Cassidy, sought preselection for the new Federal seat of Lowe and asked McMahon to speak at Strathfield on his behalf. So impressed were the Liberal Party women whom he addressed that they encouraged McMahon to stand for preselection himself.

Elected in December 1949 as the Liberal member for Lowe, he was to hold the seat for thirty-two years, although he never lived in the electorate.

The 30 new Liberal and Country party members in 1949 included Paul Hasluck, Hubert Opperman and Arthur Fadden and Senators John Gorton, Ivy Wedgewood and Bill Spooner. Many of these new members had served in war and returned home with their aspiration to serve Australia in peacetime.

McMahon delivered his maiden speech on 2 March 1950. Its theme was that the coalition parties had a greater prospect of maintaining full employment than the Australian Labor Party whose ‘lack of warmth for private enterprise’ and tendency to increase the size of the public service channelled employment into non-productive spheres and seventy-six years later nothing has changed.

After only three years in Parliament, McMahon became minister for the navy and minister for air. He visited troops in Korea and approved Sir James Hardman’s reorganisation of the RAAF along functional command lines.

Appointed minister for social services in 1954, he supported the building of more rehabilitation facilities to enable disabled people to enter the workforce.

The minister for trade, John McEwen who later became a fierce opponent of McMahon lobbied Robert Menzies to promote McMahon and on 11 January 1956 he was elevated to cabinet as minister for primary industry. With no experience in agriculture, McMahon was expected to comply with decisions made by McEwen. Instead, by working hard and mastering his brief, he often brought matters to cabinet without McEwen’s knowledge and argued against his senior minister.

In 1958 he went to his longest held portfolio eight years as minister for labour and national service. McMahon introduced the National Service Act that authorised conscription for army service. Australia was soon to send troops to fight in South Vietnam and the Borneo and the State of Malaysia.

The government also wished to increase army manpower in case of wider conflicts involving the country’s commitments under the South-East Asia Treaty Organization and the Australia, New Zealand, United States Security Treaty.

He pursued the Communist-dominated Waterside Workers Federation, established an inquiry into waterfront efficiency and employment, legislated to strip the WWF of its authority over recruitment and made deregistration of the union theoretically possible.

From 1964 to 1966 he was vice-president of the Executive Council.

On 11 December 1965 at St Mark’s Church of England, Darling Point, McMahon had married Sonia Rachel Hopkins, an occupational therapist and film production assistant who was attractive and vivacious and twenty-four years his junior. She caught the eye of the international media in Washington DC in 1971 when she wore a dress with a thigh-length split to a state dinner at the White House. Steadfastly loyal, she provided both emotional support and political counsel. They had two daughters, Melinda and Deborah, and a son Julian.

When Harold Holt replaced Menzies as prime minister on 26 January 1966, McMahon defeated Paul Hasluck for the deputy leadership. Hasluck was the establishment candidate, supported by Menzies, but unlike McMahon he refused to campaign for the role. As deputy, McMahon was also treasurer – the post he had always wanted.

McMahon developed good relationships with his department, which contained a number of highly skilled economists, and was appointed a governor of the International Monetary Fund and chairman of the board of governors of the Asian Development Bank.

Extensive knowledge of his portfolio, his understanding of economics, his inquisition of public servants and his desire to keep control of expenditure often made him unpopular, but these qualities boosted his reputation as a treasurer. He introduced four budgets, gradually reducing the deficit from $644 million in 1967-68 to $30 million in 1969-70.

His budgets were characterised by significant increased spending on defence, drought assistance, pension benefits and grants to the States, and by new Commonwealth programs for the health, education and housing of Aborigines, and for school libraries. Funding came from increased company and sales tax rates, radio and television licence fees, air navigation charges and overseas borrowings. Together with John Gorton, he tried to resist State demands for extra revenue.

Relations between the Treasury and the Department of Trade were strained even when Holt was treasurer. When McMahon became treasurer his relationship with McEwen deteriorated further. They clashed over industry protection, McMahon’s opposition to the establishment of the Australian Industry Development Corporation and his ultimately vindicated decision not to devalue the Australian dollar. McEwen accused McMahon of being behind the Basic Industries Group, a pro-free-trade agricultural lobby that funded Western Australian and Victorian Liberals to stand against Country Party members. The Governor-General, Lord Casey, met with McMahon to encourage him to heal relations with McEwen, but there were persistent tensions that the affable Holt found difficult to manage.

Following Holt’s disappearance on 17 December 1967, Casey installed McEwen as ‘caretaker’ prime minister. McEwen announced that he and his party would not serve in a coalition headed by McMahon. Initially McMahon sought to contest the leadership, notwithstanding the veto, but soon withdrew in favour of Gorton.

At the November 1969 Federal election Gorton’s government suffered a swing against it of almost 7 per cent. David Fairbairn and then McMahon announced that they would contest the leadership; Gorton survived by only a few votes.

Gorton then moved McMahon, against his wishes, from Treasury to the Department of External Affairs. There, McMahon’s concerns were the spread of communism, the growing Russian interest in South-East Asia, British plans to withdraw troops from the region and the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War. Responsible for creating specialist Asian and policy research branches, he changed the department’s name to the Department of Foreign Affairs in November 1970.

When Gorton lost office on 10 March 1971 McMahon stood for the leadership and easily defeated Billy Snedden. Gorton became his deputy.

Although McMahon came to the prime ministership with longer ministerial experience than anyone else who has held the office, he inherited a divided and dispirited party and suffered from active undermining of his leadership and cabinet instability.

McMahon’s prime ministership was a blend of cautious innovation and fundamental orthodoxy; he restored Sir John Bunting as secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and strove to placate State premiers.

He created the Department of the Environment, Aborigines and the Arts, the Australian Institute of Marine Science and the Australian Wool Corporation, and he gained full Australian membership of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development; he gave additional assistance to independent schools on a per capita basis, provided Commonwealth funding for child-care centres, abolished the pensioner means test and instigated the Henderson commission of inquiry into poverty.

He was outmanoeuvred on China policy, having criticised the July 1971 meeting of the Opposition leader Gough Whitlam with Chinese leaders, just as the president of the United States of America, Richard Nixon, announced his own proposed visit to Peking.

Unable to bring the economy under control, his government presided in 1972 over higher inflation and unemployment rates and a low growth rate, despite increased government spending. Worse was to come as a result of the shambolic policies of the Whitlam Government.

His term as prime minister was probably the least rewarding chapter of his career.

Before the age of widespread opinion polling, McMahon took soundings at all hours of the day and night from contacts in business, the media and government. He assiduously cultivated the media, and Frank Packer, who lived up the road was a longstanding friend and supporter.

In the December 1972 Federal election, the Coalition lost government to the ALP. Labor achieved only a 2.5 per cent swing and a net gain of eight seats. An additional 1917 votes in five seats would have seen McMahon re-elected.

Remaining in parliament until 4 January 1982, McMahon was a frequent commentator on economic and political issues, offering advice and criticising both the government and opposition.

His retirement from parliament caused a by-election in the then marginal seat of Lowe, which fell to Labor.

In retirement McMahon travelled, worked as a consultant to the Bank of America and wrote an unpublished autobiography. He had skin cancers removed from his body, including having one ear removed.

He died aged 80 on 31 March 1988.

Whitlam conceded that without McMahon’s skill, resourcefulness and tenacity the ALP victory ‘would have been more convincing than it was’. These qualities and his persistence against adversity were the hallmarks of his personal and political life.

Ambitious and pragmatic. McMahon once said, ‘Politics is trying to get into office’. He was accused of leaking information and engaging in intrigue. He was a difficult personality: Alan Reid wrote of his ‘nervy intensity’. Occasionally accident-prone, he made damaging ‘slips of the tongue’.

Nevertheless, he made a major contribution to postwar Australian politics, particularly in tariff policy debates. Although he lacked the flair of Whitlam, he was a capable administrator and a shrewd negotiator. He deserves to be remembered better than he is today.

I hope that this plaque fosters local interest in Sir William McMahon and I commend all those who have been involved in bringing it about.

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