Power Plays: Australia’s crazy political history features in new Sky News series
Sex scandals, an assassination attempt, Russian spies and the day a prime minister vanished — a new series is about to show Aussie politics has always been bonkers.
Australian politicians today could never get away with rocking up to a seedy hotel in only a towel after losing their trousers on a wild night out.
But that’s exactly what former prime minister Malcolm Fraser did at the Admiral Benbow Inn in Memphis in October 1986.
Fraser claimed he had been drugged and had his trousers stolen, along with his $10,000 Rolex watch, his passport, wallet and $600 cash.
He refused to comment any further than saying “I wish I’d never been to bloody Memphis.”
It’s one of the more bizarre moments in Australia’s political about to be covered in a new series by Sky News.
Sex scandals, an assassination attempt, a constitutional crisis, Russian spies and the day prime minister Harold Holt vanished without a trace are other momentous moments that rocked Canberra set to be covered in the 10-episode series, Power Plays, which begins today.
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“You’ve got to admire his chutzpah in sticking to the line,” Sky News and Power Plays host David Speers said about Fraser’s trouser mishap.
“You can only imagine what would happen today with the swarm of media that would descend on that little hotel. Can you imagine the internet memes that would follow?”
Aussies can be forgiven for thinking the past decade has been unprecedented in its insanity after eight leadership spills, six prime ministers, a dual-citizenship crisis which snared 15 MPs, multiple sex scandals — one involving the deputy prime minister — and Donald Trump being elected president of the United States.
But it pales in comparison to when a former Labor leader, Arthur Calwell, was almost assassinated by a 19-year-old factory worker in 1966 with a 0.22 sawn-off rifle, just months out from the federal election.
Calwell’s would-be assassin tried to shoot him through the passenger-side window of his car outside an anti-conscription rally in Sydney but the glass slowed the bullet.
It wasn’t a political vendetta. The teen shooter later told police he had only wanted to do “something out of the ordinary” so he didn’t “remain a nobody” his whole life.
“It was a very big deal when it happened,” Labor heavyweight Graham Richardson said.
“I think it just woke us all up. If you think about it, this is about the only country in the world where politicians can wander around without guards and all the rest of it.”
Then-deputy prime minister Jim Cairns’ affair with his Secretary Junie Morosi — which was thrust back into the spotlight last year when Barnaby Joyce’s affair with his former staffer Vicki Campion became public — is also covered in Power Plays, along with the time former Liberal leader Billy Snedden “died on the job”.
The series also details the “reds under the bed” communism scare, Russian foreign interference and the unprecedented day Gough Whitlam’s Labor government was sacked by Governor-General Sir John Kerr, including how Whitlam went home for lunch without telling anyone it was coming first and the stalling tactics his parliament used to try to prevent the inevitable.
“We like to think that everything that’s happening in our politics today is historic, is extraordinary,” Speers said.
“When you look back, you realise we’ve had such a rich, controversial and tumultuous political history that really, what we’re seeing today is fascinating but it’s not the first time we’ve seen a bit of turmoil.”
*Power Plays will premiere on Sky News Live and Foxtel channels 103 and 600 at 7.45am on Sunday, and will air again at 6.45pm.
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