The Laurie Oakes report: a journalist’s five decades of scoops

Laurie Oakes has been reporting on Australian politics for more than 50 years.

Laurie Oakes knew he wanted to be a journalist from the moment he wandered into the office of student newspaper Honi Soit on his first day at University of Sydney.

“I was there on a teachers ­college scholarship but I realised pretty early that teaching wasn’t for me,” Oakes tells Inquirer. “I walked into the Honi Soit office and there were quite famous ­people kicking around … and I thought: ‘This is for me.’ ”

Oakes, 72, has been reporting on Australian politics for more than 50 years, a milestone reached last year. Famous for his news-breaking and sharp-edge reporting and commentary, he has done almost everything: newspapers, magazines, television, books and even self-publishing.

Few journalists have earned more respect from politicians, their peers or audiences, and fewer could be said to have so dramatically influenced the course of political events.

In a wide-ranging interview, Oakes reflects on his five decades in journalism, assesses the best and worst politicians, and discusses how the media has changed and the advice he offers to younger colleagues.

Oakes describes editing Honi Soit — on his own and with serial gadfly Bob Ellis — as “good training in politics and backbiting” and “better than a cadetship” because of the range of skills that were quickly learned.

“It was a good experience because you had to do everything, from writing to subbing to laying out the page, and in those days ­taking it down to the printery, standing over the hot metal while the comps put it all together,” he says.

In 1964, after earning a bachelor of arts, Oakes joined Sydney’s Daily Mirror to work the midnight-to-dawn crime round, before switching to state politics the following year.

“The Sydney afternoon newspaper business was really competitive,” Oakes recalls. “If one of us missed a story one night, we were out to cut the other one’s throat with a good yarn the next night. Sydney in those days was a pretty exciting town when it came to crime, especially after dark, and it was much the same on the political round.”

On Oakes’s first day at the Daily Mirror he met Rupert ­Murdoch, who had recently moved to Sydney to shake up the newspaper market by challenging the established Packer and Fairfax media dynasties.

“I was shown around the building and they took me up to where the comps worked and there’s ­Rupert, sleeves rolled up, the young proprietor pointing out where he wanted the headlines to go, very hands-on — that was quite an introduction,” Oakes says.

In 1965, Bob Askin led the ­Liberals to power for the first time in NSW. Oakes took over the Daily Mirror political round from John Higgins, who went to work for the government.

“There wasn’t a lot of difference between crime and politics,” Oakes says. “I used to quite like (Askin), in those early years anyway, before we knew anything about paper bags full of money being delivered to his office.”

Oakes called Askin every morning scouting for a yarn. It was agreed Oakes would hang up after three rings, then immediately phone back. If Askin didn’t like what Oakes had written in the paper the day before, then the phone wouldn’t be answered.

“You learned pretty early that politics is a tough game and you are dealing with tough people — they will go to great lengths to try and control what you write,” Oakes says.

He got a taste of federal politics when Harry Gordon poached him to go to Melbourne in 1967 and work for The Sun News-Pictorial. There, he covered Harold Holt’s death and the subsequent leadership struggle within the Liberal Party.

In 1969, aged 25, Oakes was sent to Canberra to become bureau chief for The Sun News-Pictorial in the parliamentary press gallery, succeeding Herschel Hurst.

In a letter Hurst sent to Billy McMahon in late 1968 — found by this writer in McMahon’s papers at the National Library of Australia — he described “Oaks” as “young, bright and very likeable”.

“I was only 25 and (Gordon) put me in charge of what was then by far the biggest-selling newspaper in the country … to this day I don’t know why Harry decided I was the person for the job,” he says.

The press gallery was then dominated by journalists such as Alan Reid, Ian Fitchett, Wallace Brown and Allan Barnes. “The guard was slowly changing and the approach was changing,” Oakes says. He remembers a “formidable” young Alan Ramsey, who was beginning to make his mark.

Media access to politicians was far less restricted in the 1960s. Oakes recalls wandering into John “Black Jack” McEwen’s ­office for a cup of tea and getting a late-night call from McMahon to discuss what was happening in cabinet.

“You could stand in King’s Hall — as Alan Reid taught me to do — and just about every politician in the building at some stage would go past and you could buttonhole them, and so could constituents by the way. There was no security,” Oakes remembers.

Oakes has written a string of books, including four that chronicle the Whitlam era. His Whitlam: PM (1973) remains the best biog­raphy dealing with Gough Whitlam’s early life. Oakes was close to Whitlam. He recalls being inside the rented room at the Sunnybrook Motel in Cabramatta when Whitlam learned Labor had won the 1972 election.

“I’d been gathering stuff for a couple of years when I could,” he says. “I interviewed his family and school mates and people who knew him in the old days around the Sutherland Shire … I understood Gough Whitlam better than I did any other politician that I have covered.”

In the late 1970s he began publishing The Laurie Oakes Report, a journal that had a wide readership for several years. It was a brave move, akin to today’s self-published bloggers or new media entrepreneurs eager to challenge traditional mastheads.

Oakes also started working in television. He appeared on Willesee at Seven on the Seven Network. In 1979, he joined Ten and in 1984 moved to Nine, where he remains political editor. His interviews on the ­Sunday program were essential viewing. No journalist today puts together a better political package for TV news.

He enjoys TV most because it is the medium that has the biggest impact. “I think television is unbeatable,” he says. “I love words, which is what got me into journalism, but pictures add an enormous amount. I was astounded by how I could increase the impact of a story by being able to use vision and sound.”

He is critical of MPs for being too frightened of TV and not using it to fully convey their personality and communicate their policies.

“When television was new, politicians would be themselves, mostly, and I think used it more effectively,” he says.

“I don’t think there is a golden age of politicians, but we don’t have a (Paul) Keating or a (Bob) Hawke or a Whitlam or even a John Howard who have the courage to be themselves.

“Politicians are wary of being caught out. They are surrounded by people who tell them what to say and what not to say. They give silly advice like: ‘Don’t answer the ­question you’re asked, give the answer you want.’ That just makes them look silly and shifty. I think it is to the detriment of not only the political process but the politicians themselves.”

In the early 80s, Oakes wrote for The Age before joining the staff of The Bulletin in 1985. After the magazine printed its last edition in 2008, Oakes took his column to the News Corp tabloids, where it runs on Saturdays.

“I try and tell people something new,” he says. “I like to open a column with an anecdote that ­illustrates the point and gets ­people’s attention so they will read on. I don’t think people want to read a column to see what my political ideology is. That’s the style of some people, but it wouldn’t work for me.”

Oakes’s cultivation of sources, a few lucky breaks and shrewd deduction work has delivered him more scoops than probably any other political journalist.

He revealed, inter alia, Labor’s plan to accept cash from Iraq’s Socialist Party in 1976; the Fraser government’s budget days before it was released in 1980; the secret leadership pact between Hawke and Keating sealed at Kirribilli House in 1988; Liberal president Shane Stone’s memo labelling the Howard government “mean, tricky and out of touch” in 2001; and dissent over FuelWatch in the Rudd cabinet in 2008.

The leaks against Julia Gillard during the 2010 election probably lost Labor outright election victory, Oakes acknowledges. “I think her campaign was derailed (and) if it hadn’t been derailed she would have done better in the election, which means that she would not have been a minority government,” he says.

The Whitlam government’s plan to appoint Democratic ­Labour Party senator Vince Gair as ambassador to Ireland in 1974 to increase their Senate numbers is the scoop that Oakes is most proud of because it required ­detective work.

“My colleague John Lombard had been told there was a diplomatic appointment in the pipeline that was quite interesting and he mentioned it to me,” Oakes says. “So I rang people to ask about the appointment and they all clammed up. One person said, ‘I can’t talk to you about it — it’s big, big, big.’

“So I paced up and down ­trying to think what could be ‘big, big, big’ and came up with the ­hypothesis that Whitlam was planning to offer Vince Gair something to get him out of the Senate. Then I rang people as though I knew that to be fact and they said: ‘How did you find that out?’ and spilled their guts.”

Oakes rates Hawke as the best prime minister he has covered, ­followed by Howard, but says Keating is the most “effective ­politician overall”. He respected Hawke’s discipline and cabinet leadership, says Howard learned from his mistakes while Keating’s advocacy skills were a cut above the rest.

It is no contest for the worst. “McMahon was vicious and he was a liar,” Oakes says. “He had nothing to recommend him and it is a terrible embarrassment to the Liberal Party that they made him prime minister.”

Oakes suggests the election this year will be closer than polls ­currently show. “Malcolm Turnbull is something of a novelty,” he says. “People have forgotten why they didn’t like him when he was ­opposition leader. They like him now, but some of the characteristics that drove them away back then are still there and they will return. The contest will even out. That being said, I don’t see much sign of Bill Shorten taking the world by storm.”

Oakes sees Twitter, which he joined in 2009, as just one of the many changes that have sped up the news cycle, often to the detriment of politicians and journalists.

“Stories come and go so quickly that politicians have to make instant judgments and the same applies to journalists,” he says. “We don’t have the same time we used to have before we commit our opinions to paper or broadcast them. It’s almost unavoidable, but it’s unhealthy.”

But technology also provides an opportunity to tell stories ­better. He envisages platforms that will see text, pictures and sound increasingly integrated.

“It will just be one electronic platform taking in all those forms of media that we have been used to all in one place,” he says. “Younger journalists are going to have a pretty exciting time but they are going to be working hard.”

Oakes is often asked by greenhorn journalists for advice. He ­offers two instructions: “always protect your sources” and “you’ve got to live it” to succeed.

“It’s got to become your life,” he says. “That’s a big ask because that means it drags you away from other things you could be doing. Everyday normal living gets ­sacrificed in the process but it’s a pretty exciting life. You meet some extraordinary people.”