Andrew Rule: Bob Hawke and Bill Landeryou and a descent into hatred
Behind Bob Hawke’s daughter Rosslyn’s rape allegations against union heavy Bill Landeryou is a story of power politics, friendship and hatred, writes Andrew Rule.
Andrew Rule
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When the mob ended union boss Jimmy Hoffa’s career near Detroit in 1975, his family never found the body.
When Bob Hawke killed union boss “Big Bill” Landeryou’s career in 1983, the body was left in plain sight, still breathing — but condemned to irrelevance for life.
Hawke did him slowly. Landeryou was exiled to no man’s land, no longer the feared operator with an armed “heavy” watching his back the way he had in his heyday running the Storemen & Packers’ Union.
“See that bloke (deleted),” an old unionist once told a budding Labor minister, indicating Landeryou’s bodyguard. “Doesn’t bother threatening people. Just hurts ’em.”
When new Victorian premier John Cain sacked the troublesome Landeryou from his cabinet in 1983 (for what Landeryou downplayed as “a parking ticket”), his “mate” in Canberra could have thrown him a rope. Instead, Hawke let him sink.
Hawke said little about freezing out the powerbroker who’d helped him leapfrog from Trades Hall to the Lodge. He barely mentioned Landeryou in decades. That silence only deepens the mystery. Labor insiders who knew both men in their hard-drinking union days in the 1970s have wondered for 35 years about Hawke’s estrangement from someone he owed so much.
The puzzle fell into place last week when Hawke’s daughter Rosslyn Dillon claimed Landeryou had raped her the year Hawke was making his big move for Canberra.
It all adds up, a Labor heavyweight told friends this week. The sex allegations fit the facts about the old friends falling out. That alone does not prove truth but it adds weight. So does Dillon’s claim that when she told her father, he didn’t want to go to the police.
Debunkers have already picked holes in poor Rosslyn’s ragged account of being forced to have sex with her father’s drinking buddy, the one who’d given her a job as a favour. But the thrust of the accusation explains Landeryou’s demise in a way nothing else seems to. No one but Landeryou could deliver the cross-union support Hawke needed to run for the leadership. If Rosslyn’s allegations are true, says a former Labor minister, Hawke could not have faced a worse dilemma.
To be fair to Hawke, he must have feared that going to court would smash his troubled daughter’s fragile credibility and self-respect. Better, Hawke might have concluded, to avoid court — and punish Landeryou another way.
If Dillon’s rape claims are bogus it means Landeryou must have done something else serious enough to anger Hawke. It’s hard to imagine what that could be.
One reporter who covered Victorian politics in the late 1970s and 1980s recalls: “Some of us knew there’d been some sort of sexual assault. Landeryou had dreams of going to Canberra on the coat-tails of his mate Hawkie, but that was dead.”
He describes Landeryou as “a slug and a thug”. He says the new-broom Labor premier John Cain couldn’t wait to get rid of Landeryou in 1983 because he (Cain) thought the tubby union boss was a liability.
A well-known ABC journalist who covered state politics in the 1980s describes Landeryou as “a sly, crafty manipulator, which explains why not many people liked him”. A female reporter on the same beat in Landeryou’s time as member for the upper house seat of Doutta Galla recalls him as “quite the power figure” and one of a handful of “slightly intimidating” members she and other women were wary of.
“You wouldn’t want to be near him late at night when he was on the scotch — which was also true of a few others in parliament, on both sides.”
Hawke was outrageously promiscuous “but never sinister”, she says. “You could tell Bob to piss off.”
A male reporter recalls Landeryou taking him to the empty upper house chamber to show him passages in the Statute Book for a story. Landeryou tore out the relevant pages and handed them to the stunned reporter, who says it sums up a man “who always cut corners”.
The whiff of impropriety trailed Landeryou. He was accused, for instance, of pressuring the controversial government business funding body, the Victorian Economic Development Corporation, to lend money to a dodgy mining venture whose backers had criminal records. Cain dumped him.
By 1987 Landeryou was yesterday’s man, a stunning fall in only four years. The Herald’s Mark Harding interviewed him about his decline that year. He wrote, in part:
“How come a winner like Bill Landeryou is today considered by so many to be a loser? In 1983 he was sacked from the Cain government … over an alleged conflict of interest in his position as the Minister for Industrial Affairs. And he drifted away from his one-time drinking mate, Mr Hawke, over differences that some say were political, others say were personal, and still others say were political and personal.”
All these years later, Harding is not sure what the “personal differences” were, only that political reporters must have tipped him off that Hawke now despised Landeryou.
Hawke clearly felt guilty about Rosslyn. It seemed to his staff and colleagues that she played on this as her life ran off the rails. When Hawke was PM, recalls one, Rosslyn would call and demand to speak to him during Cabinet meetings. A former St Kilda policeman around that time recalls her being arrested, only to have her father intervene and spirit her away without charges.
The arrest was another milestone on Rosslyn’s decline. The striking young woman she had been before working for Landeryou turned into a ravaged junkie.
The two former union giants died earlier this year within weeks of each other. For each, the eulogies were long and glowing. The difference was in scale. Hawke’s Sydney Opera House extravaganza was fit for a national hero; Landeryou’s modest state funeral was in Moonee Ponds.
Each attracted long parliamentary condolence motions. The flaws of each man were expertly glossed over. But it was only a matter of time before cracks appeared.
Almost to the end, Bob Hawke got away with the sort of behaviour that must have infuriated his children, both his wives and the odd mistress.
A few years before he died, Hawke took one of the many “consultancies” that helped make him far wealthier than most retired politicians. Presumably, the money did not come in bundles of $100 notes that some big bookmakers used to sling him while he was PM. The consultant fees were more likely transferred conventionally by controversial businessman Adrian Ballintine right up until the $600m collapse of his NewSat company.
Ballintine splashed a lot of NewSat investor money around. Some of it was for Sydney Harbour “love boat” cruises featuring up to 20 strippers to entertain useful guests like Hawke.
On one such jaunt, someone on board snapped a photograph of Hawke with the (entirely legitimate) club owner who supplied the exotic dancers. According to a waiter, the picture was taken just before Hawke retired to a private cabin with the youngest dancer. She had a distinctive tattoo on her back.
Ballintine is not the only one good at spending other people’s money. According to documents lodged with the NSW Supreme Court on December 6, Rosslyn Dillon’s lawyers have already run up a bill of $118,232.
While it is hard to prove what Bill Landeryou did to their client in 1982, this affidavit suggests she is being screwed for every dollar in 2019.