Brian Burke: the pollie who fell to earth

He was a brilliant politician; then it all went bad. Brian Burke reflects on his colourful past, mistakes and life on the outer.

TWAM 6 June 2015

To get to Brian Burke’s house, you drive north along Perth’s boundless coastline past one of the starkest reminders of the irrational exuberance of the 1980s, the 25-­storey Observation City (now Rendezvous) hotel built by local tycoon Alan Bond.

A few minutes later, you arrive at Trigg Beach, where a few hardy swimmers are braving the autumnal chill. One block back from the sand, at the end of a sleepy cul-de-sac, Brian Thomas Burke – a radically slimmed-down version of the one-time Labor colossus – welcomes me into his comfortable home and ushers me upstairs. After several months of turning down my requests for an interview, he has finally agreed to talk.

It’s soon clear that Burke, one of the most divisive and controversial figures in Australian politics over the past three decades, has become more reflective, perhaps a little mellower, as he ponders his legacy. He is generous, funny, charming and, in full flight, mesmerising. At times it seems like he remembers every conversation he’s ever had and the name of everyone he’s ever met. But it’s also clear he hasn’t lost his Machiavellian streak; he can be wily and controlling.

Burke’s bout of introspection has been sparked by an autobiography that he’s been working on recently, and which he hopes to have published this year. But don’t expect the staunch Catholic to confess to any major sins. He is unapologetic and unremorseful. Every accusation about corruption and criminal conduct is flicked away with long-rehearsed lines.

Despite two jail terms and a string of other well-documented brushes with the law that halted his career as a political lobbyist and led, in his own words, to his status as “Australia’s most vilified man”, Burke appears to have done all right for himself. In fact, the 68-year-old ­former premier’s vista of the sparkling Indian Ocean is almost as good as the view from Bond’s old hotel. Burke would hate the comparison with Bond, but the two men are the highest- profile survivors of the WA Inc era, which ended in both of them serving time. The Burke clan owns three large houses in the street, all next to each other, along with three vacant blocks of land that are being sold off for about $1 million each. Two gleaming Mercedes-Benz cars sit in Burke’s driveway.

But he has invited me here in an attempt to convey the opposite impression: that the years of scandal and “unjust” prosecutions have exacted a heavy toll on his personal finances, caused untold stress for his family and strained his relationships with friends and associates. Many of his old mates, such as former construction union leader Kevin Reynolds and veteran radio broadcaster Bob Maumill, have stuck by him over the years. But some people cross the road to avoid having to speak to him, he notes.

As Burke begins talking, his stoic wife Sue ­listens attentively, wipes up spilt coffee and fetches her husband’s headache pills when he needs them. Two of his 17 grandchildren are watching Peppa Pig on TV and his two beloved indoor birds, a cockatiel and an African lovebird, are chirping with vigour. Outside are Burke’s two prized red-tailed black cockatoos. “They are just beautiful birds – I spend half an hour with them every day,” he smiles. Burke still has a restless energy about him – he still makes plenty of phone calls and has been helping eldest son Peter with some property deals. He gives the impression of a man who would love to be back in the thick of it. After all, he once ruled this town.

Brian Burke was the most brilliant and ­popular politician in the nation when he ran Western Australia with youthful flair during the economic boom of the 1980s. After becoming premier on his 36th birthday, in 1983, he became fatally close to a gaggle of dodgy ­wheeler-dealers, including Bond and the late Laurie “Last Resort” Connell. And after exactly five years in the job, Burke stepped down on his 41st birthday, because, he reflects now, he was “bored”. Most assumed he would go to Canberra and take a shot at the prime ministership but Burke insists his only ambition at the time was a diplomatic posting to Ireland, his ancestral homeland. Bob Hawke, who had praised Burke as a “great Australian”, appointed him ambassador to Ireland and the Holy See.

Three years later, however, Burke was forced to return to Perth to face the WA Inc royal commission, which led to findings of his “grossly improper” conduct as premier over ­disastrous business dealings that cost WA taxpayers dearly. In 1994, he was convicted and served seven months in jail for rorting his travel expenses as premier, becoming the first head of any government in Australia to go to prison. “Nobody thinks I did it,” he says now, with characteristic chutzpah. He later served six months of a three-year sentence for stealing $122,000 in ALP campaign donations before that conviction was overturned on appeal.

By the early 2000s, Burke was busily remaking his reputation, setting up a spectacularly successful political lobbying business with his old Labor ministerial chum Julian Grill. WA’s then premier, Geoff Gallop, was horrified at the duo’s rising influence within his government and banned his ministers from having contact with them, but it had little effect. Gallop’s successor, Alan Carpenter, lifted the ban – a move he would come to deeply regret.

The mining boom in the west was cranking up and plenty of companies were happy to pay tens of thousands of dollars for Burke to work his magic. Whatever the problem, the lobbyist always seemed to “know someone” he could lean on to fix it. Using flattery and intimidation, Burke could obtain a confidential document, persuade a minister to slash red tape or convince a public servant to take a sudden interest in some hitherto insignificant cause. The former premier’s influence within the Labor Party meant he held sway over some MPs and ministerial staffers who were relying on his help with fundraising or preselection.

Yet Burke was more than an aggressive spruiker with top-notch contacts. He also devised sneaky methods of bypassing the usual channels to get things done. Some of these practices seemed an affront to democracy. When a local government in WA’s south-west refused to back a $330 million hotel project, Burke helped to secretly finance and promote a group of council candidates more likely to favour the development.

And when Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest’s then-fledgling miner Fortescue Metals Group needed new laws rushed through parliament in late 2005, Burke came up with the idea of introducing the Bill into the upper house rather than the lower house, ensuring it was passed in a ­single day. Burke’s lobbying work for Forrest ensured Fortescue was able to win all of its ­government approvals in record time and begin exporting iron ore from the Pilbara by 2008.

As the money poured in, Burke’s activities attracted the attention of WA’s new Corruption and Crime Commission, which began bugging his phones and monitoring his emails. The CCC must have had trouble keeping up. In 2006, the assiduous networker’s best year in business, Burke racked up a staggering 25,389 phone calls, faxes and text messages.

By the time the CCC exposed Burke’s modus operandi by launching a public inquiry and playing extracts of his phone calls to an aghast public, the game was up. The CCC was chasing Burke for corruption and the rest of the nation was asking itself how such a tainted figure from the 1980s had been able to manoeuvre himself back into a position of influence in the Wild West.

The answer, in part, stems from Perth’s tight networks of patronage and its relatively small talent pool, along with the city’s tradition of absolving its “lovable rogues”. During the furore, Paul Keating described Burke and Grill as the “Arthur Daley and Terry” of the West Australian Labor Party – a reference to the TV hit Minder – but also noted Burke was “smarter than two-thirds of the Labor Party rolled together; that’s why he keeps bobbing up”.

Burke didn’t help his reputation for shadiness by turning up to the inquiry each day wearing a Panama hat and dark sunglasses. By 2007, four Labor cabinet ministers in WA had stood down or been sacked over their links to the lobbyist, including small business minister Norm Marlborough who, it was revealed, had carried a “secret” phone to take regular instructions from his old mate.

The saga took on McCarthyist undertones when the Howard government tried to ensnare Labor leader Kevin Rudd over revelations of a Perth dinner he’d attended with Burke two years earlier. Treasurer Peter Costello fanned the flames of hysteria by declaring: “Anyone who deals with Brian Burke is morally and politically compromised.” Yet those words quickly backfired on the federal government when WA ­Liberal senator Ian Campbell was forced to resign after admitting he had met Burke for just 20 minutes over a routine electorate matter.

After the spotlight dimmed, Burke endured several years of trials that resulted in only one conviction: of giving false evidence to the CCC, for which he copped a $25,000 fine. Reflecting on the imbroglio, Burke is unrepentant. He reveals he has personally spent $2.3 million on legal fees as a result of the CCC’s investigation. He says he has not worked as a lobbyist since 2006, has no income, no savings and a “very big” mortgage on his house. He says he and Sue are being financially supported by their property developer son Peter, who lives next door.

Burke denies deliberately misleading the CCC, insisting he answered all of the questions put to him as best he could. “Only frightened people tell lies; I’m not frightened,” he says. He argues that the CCC’s pursuit of him achieved nothing, and that the commission is deeply flawed and damaged by weak leadership.

Burke is undeniably correct on one point: the CCC has been racked by severe dysfunction and appears to have struggled to attract the best legal minds. Only recently a new commissioner, the respected Supreme Court judge John McKechnie, has taken charge after the post had been vacant for about a year. Premier Colin Barnett wants the commission to focus more on organised crime rather than political misconduct.

Burke argues that in his case the CCC’s sweeping powers – including the right to install recording devices in private homes and the right to interrogate people without legal representation – were misused. He describes the CCC’s tactic of using its hearings to play ­private recordings of conversations to often stunned witnesses, who had no right of cross-­examination, as one that lacked procedural fairness and, moreover, failed to get to the truth.

Burke grows visibly angry when discussing the “innocent victims” of the CCC, which in his mind include the public servants accused of acting on his orders as well as Norm Marlborough, who was driven to contemplate suicide. “The problem with the CCC is that powers as per­vasive as that should only rest in the most able hands, and they didn’t,” says Burke, who argues NSW’s Independent Commission Against Corruption operates more fairly and has succeeded in uncovering genuine corruption.

Unsurprisingly, Burke won’t countenance the view – widely held among his ­critics – that the CCC inquiry’s biggest achievement was to expose his sneaky lobbying methods and to therefore ensure he could no longer influence government decision-making on behalf of his clients. “Do you spend $30 million to expose the way I operate?” he asks. “People like you say, ‘Well, it shone the spotlight on the way you operated’. Well, it did do that. But look at the line of broken bodies and the unfair treatment of people. This all happened because the ­investigators, thinking they could make their reputations by pursuing me, took control of the whole CCC process. They looked at every ­single part of me and came up with nothing.”

Burke now admits that many of his salacious phone conversations that were played at the inquiry sounded bad, but he maintains that he does not regret any of his actions as a lobbyist. In one taped call, Burke boasted that he had a Labor minister’s “pants off him and [I’m] f..king working on his shirt and he doesn’t even f..king know it”. Burke was also heard laughing as he told Marlborough: “I’m a f..king handful, aren’t I”, to which Marlborough, then a cabinet ­minister, replied: “You’re going to get me shot, you know.” Says Burke now: “I cringe when I listen to the phone calls that were recorded and I wish that I hadn’t been so pushy or so insistent. But then I think any of us would have lots of problems if someone listened to all our phone calls and then took the little bits out that looked and sounded the worst.”

He acknowledges he rubs people up the wrong way. “It’s my voice, it’s how I present things, it’s how energetic and muscular I am,” he says. “You’re always going to get that feeling when you listen to me prosecute an argument, whether it’s with you or Sue or someone else, because I generally believe very strongly in what I’m arguing about.”

Today’s political leaders would kill for Burke’s opinion poll results from the 1980s. As premier his popularity rating hit a stratospheric 73 per cent in 1986, soon after he won his ­second term in office. Burke was a young family man who lived in the working-class suburb of Balga and led a moderate ALP government that appealed to mainstream values.

The one-time heavy drinker had given up the grog in 1977 after being sprung for drink-driving. (Burke hit the back of a taxi and left the scene of the accident; he was represented by a young lawyer called Robert French, now Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia).

Before becoming premier, Burke also shed dozens of kilograms thanks to a strict diet and exercise regime. Crucially, having worked in the early ’70s as a Channel Seven reporter, Burke was also one of the first politicians to recognise the power of television. He was a natural media performer and left his opponents for dead. After being thrashed by Burke in 1986, Liberal leader Bill Hassell did his best to explain the loss: “I don’t think people dislike me, I think that it is just that they like Burke,” he said.

By 1987, the rest of the nation wanted to know more about the charismatic everyman who many believed was destined to succeed Hawke as ­federal leader. “Hard-bitten journalists are supposed not to be impressed by politicians,” wrote a journalist in The Bulletin who interviewed the premier for a gushing profile piece. “All are actors but successful politicians are those who really are the characters they are ­trying to project. Burke is likeable, plausible and credible. That makes him a rare politician whom the ALP could ill afford to be without.”

The journalist’s name was Tony Abbott, the future Liberal prime minister, and he shared with Burke a conservative social outlook and a strong commitment to Catholicism.

Burke was premier during an extraordinary period of economic confidence in WA that began when Alan Bond’s yacht Australia II won the America’s Cup, transforming the tycoon into a national hero. “There was a buzz in the air, there was almost a crackling frisson – it was the 1980s,” Burke recalls. “The economy took off and we were doing better than all the other states.” He led a reformist government on social issues, removing restrictions on the ability of people to gather in public and abolishing the death penalty. And he shocked many traditional Labor supporters by taking the radical step of cutting public servants’ salaries – including his own, all MPs, judges and even the state governor – in order to help balance the books.

As the boom picked up, Burke sensed an opportunity for taxpayers to share in the spoils. He did deals with and took advice from the so-called “four-on-the-floor” flash operators who dominated the business world, creating a body called the Western Australian Development Corporation for the government to invest in private-sector deals.

After the 1987 stock market crash, the government bailed out Laurie ­Connell’s Rothwells merchant bank and Robert Holmes à Court’s faltering empire – costly decisions that Burke insists were necessary and generally well received at the time.

Looking back, though, Burke admits he was far too young to be premier. “I thought I was bulletproof,” he says. “If things hadn’t been so easy, if I hadn’t have been so confident, I would have realised I lacked the experience.”

Burke also concedes – for the first time – that his government was too close to the entrepreneurs. “I felt that as a Labor government we’d always been criticised for being anti-business,” he says. “And I felt as though we needed to know business, we needed to be trusted by business and we needed to be able to get on with business so we could assist in creating jobs and economic growth.” He rejects the popular belief that he was ­personally close to Bond and ­Connell, saying he had neither the time nor the inclination to socialise with business people. “I think I went to Connell’s house once in my life,” he says. “I’m not a drinker, I’m not a womaniser, I don’t go to the races… we weren’t close.”

Burke also proved to be a brilliant fundraiser for the ALP. In 1985, he created the John ­Curtin Foundation through which business figures paid between $10,000 and $100,000 each for the privilege of being a “vice-patron”. Those who joined included Connell, Bond and fellow tycoons Ric Stowe, Kevin Parry and Multiplex construction king John Roberts. After a while, the premier simply began asking his favourite businessmen to hand over campaign donations to him personally, leading to the creation of the infamous Leader’s Account. According to the WA Inc royal commission report, Labor raised millions through donations to the Leader’s Account, including $2 million from Bond, $950,000 from mining magnate Lang Hancock, $860,000 from Connell and $690,000 from Roberts.

“Personal associations and the manner in which electoral contributions were obtained could only create the public perception that favour could be bought, that favour would be done,” the royal commission reported in 1992. “We have observed that the size of the donations was quite extraordinary. In his approaches the premier was direct to the point at times of being forceful.”

Burke admits that he was “hopelessly naive” in failing to ensure that campaign donations were kept separate from the business of government. But he maintains there was no corruption involved in any of his party fundraising and points out that the royal commission found no evidence of illegal behaviour on his part. “The royal commission was exhaustive – there were more than 500 witnesses,” he says. “No one has ever accused that royal commission of being less than thorough and no one has ever accused it of going soft on me. The royal commission found no evidence of corruption and it said in the report that all of the donations were not linked to any particular favour or action.”

But Burke was later charged with rorting his travel expenses to the tune of $17,000. He argues that the royal commission had created an environment that virtually ensured he would be found guilty of something. “Had I been charged with sheep stealing, I would have been convicted,” he says. “There was no chance that I would ever be regarded as anything but guilty of whatever people wanted to charge me with. It was that sort of atmosphere.”

Burke is now a Labor outcast. He was forced to resign from the party in late 2006 after then premier Alan Carpenter effectively ordered him out during the CCC furore. But Burke says he will always regard himself as a Labor man and doesn’t need a membership card to feel like one.

Burke idolised his father Tom, a federal Labor MP, and from a young age he helped his dad with electioneering, including door-knocking and handing out how-to-vote cards. His earliest memory is driving across the Nullarbor with his parents in their Humber Super Snipe to attend Ben Chifley’s funeral in Bathurst in 1951. But when Brian was a chubby kid of eight, the Labor split took place that would result in Tom Burke being expelled from the party. Burke senior died six months before Brian entered state politics in 1973.

It’s tempting to draw parallels between Burke and his father; several observers have speculated that Burke embarked on a political career to avenge his father’s poor treatment by the party. “These events [the Split] burned deeply into the heart of young Brian Burke who loved his father greatly,” wrote journalist John Hamilton in 1987. “He vowed to right what he saw as the injustice some day, reform the party and by his actions make his father proud of him.” Burke rejects this, describing it as a “worn-out hypothesis”. He says: “I loved Dad a great deal and I think he was a great man, but to say I went into politics because of him is wrong. I went into politics because I am a Labor person.”

Still, Burke’s advice for the Labor Party today is couched in the principles instilled in him by his father: “Dad used to say that the natural constituency of the Labor Party in Australia is a moderate constituency. The natural constituency will reject the extremes such as [former Queensland premier] Campbell Newman and Tony Abbott, and embrace the moderation of people like Bob Hawke.”

It is common knowledge in Perth that some Labor MPs still seek out Burke for tactical advice, but he insists he plays no real role in West Australian politics these days. And he says he does not care about his legacy – a claim seemingly at odds with his decision to write an autobiography. All he wants, he insists, is to be a good husband, father and grandfather. “I don’t have any view on how I want to be remembered,” he says. “I want to be loved by my family and I want them to respect me and remember me proudly. But with due respect, I couldn’t care less how you remember me.”

Biographer Quentin Beresford believes he will be remembered as a man who lived parallel lives. “He was an enormously gifted politician, probably one of the most gifted politicians in state or federal politics,” says Beresford, whose 2008 book The Godfather was deeply critical of Burke’s career as a politician and a lobbyist.

“But he undermined acceptable standards of governance and damaged his own reputation, probably irreparably. It’s also often overlooked that he tarnished the image of an otherwise very good government. The Burke government did some very good things and had some very capable ministers of great integrity, and a lot of those people still feel that Burke’s infamous conduct has overshadowed that record.”

Burke claims he has long learnt to live with this sort of criticism. “I accept that if I’m going to live my life the way I live it, I’m going to take hits, I’m going to make enemies and it’s going to make people uncomfortable and probably dislike me,” he says.

As I drive away from Trigg and back past Observation City, I conclude that Burke does, in fact, care deeply how he will be remembered. But surely he is way too smart to expect that the tributes will be kind. Then again, there is still plenty of time to convince people he’s been badly treated. And Perth does have a habit of forgiving its fallen heroes.

Brian Burke on:

Bill Shorten: “A thoroughly decent, pleasant person. Bill is finding it hard to cut through because cutting through requires more than just being Bill Shorten.”

Tony Abbott :“His instincts are terrible and he is only ever one breath away from a decision that again reveals the threatening harshness people so dislike.”

Malcolm Turnbull “If Malcolm Turnbull took over the Liberal Party tomorrow the Labor Party would be in opposition for three or four terms.”

Bob Hawke: “The best politician I’ve ever met.”

Paul Keating: “The architect of the Hawke Government’s achievements. Like [AFL star] Wayne Carey, Paul came closest to being the total package.”

John Howard: “He grew as a politician; he was a very good leader. The most significant prime minister in my lifetime after Hawke and Menzies.”