‘I was the youngest Australian to have an ASIO file’ – Why Phillip Adams is proud of that

Phillip Adams, 84, ends his 33-year residency as host of the ABC’s beloved Late Night Live program on Radio National next week. I spoke to him on Thursday.

Fitz: Before we get to your completion of this part of your journey, Phillip, let’s look at so many other peripatetic journeys you’ve been on in your life that gave you the wide reference points for Late Night Live to be so successful.

PA: Go on ...

Fitz: Born the son of a chaplain, you became one of Australia’s most famous atheists.

Philip Adams: “I can talk to anyone, anywhere, on any subject.”Credit: ABC

PA: Yes. I had that in common with Bob Hawke. When I was very young, my father was away in New Guinea as a chaplain to the army during the Second World War, and I came to the conclusion that God and I didn’t get on very well. We don’t believe in each other. I was five when I became convinced there is no God.

Fitz: Another journey from one end of the spectrum to the other is being born as poor as a church mouse – with your mum gathering some of the loose change from the Sunday offering plate to buy a few groceries – to now doing very well indeed?

PA: Oh, absolutely. But most of the wealth that I have came out of running my advertising agency. When I was responsible for campaigns like “Life be in it” and “Slip, Slop Slap”. I started off with a couple of partners in one room in Melbourne. And we finished having offices all over Australia, all over the region, and then finally, all over the world before we sold it off to some mad Americans, and we all made a big quid out of it.

Fitz: Early on, though, that impoverished background led you to being a godless communist at the age of 16?

Adams with wife Patrice Newell and daughter Aurora in 2010.

PA: I had been radicalised by the local public library. When the librarian said, “You’ve read all the Biggles and Just William books, here, read this one by John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath – about extreme poverty in the Depression”. And a year later, I was literally tugging on the hem of a communist speaker at Yarra Bank, asking, “Where do I sign up?” And a year later, Peter, I had an ASIO file, and I’m very proud of the fact that I was the youngest-ever Australian to have his own ASIO file.

Fitz: What on earth had you done to merit the honour beyond being a Godless nark going to red-devil commie meetings?

PA: Nothing more than being a member of the Communist Party at the height of the Cold War!

Fitz: Under freedom-of-information laws, or whatever, were you able to get that ASIO file?

PA: They denied having one for decades. But when I was getting a gong at Yarralumla many years ago, I found myself in the same queue as a Mr Spry, who was a heavy hitter at ASIO, and I said, “Isn’t this a wonderful country? A few years ago, you had a file on me, and now here we are, getting a gong together.” He conceded I had one, and I finally got a heavily redacted copy of it from the National Archives. I was pleased to see that you weren’t in it, Peter. You bloody well should be!

Fitz: We radical bomb-throwers must stick together … So what made you then, at 19, look at the Communist Party and go, “This is not me.” What happened?

Gough Whitlam, right, with, Jim Cairns in 1975. “Gough always referred to me as ‘Cairns’ campaign manager’“.

PA: Well, a lot of things happened. The Khrushchev denunciation of Stalin happened. We’d had the Hungarian horror stretch – with Soviet tanks rolling into Budapest in 1956 – and communism revealed itself to be a monumental and tragic failure. And we knew that the crimes of Stalin ran a very close second to the crimes of Hitler in terms of numbers killed.

Fitz: So you join the Labor Party and are soon moving in high Labor circles, just at the time that Gough Whitlam is starting his rise.

PA: I almost cost Gough his job. You will recall that Gough threw a hissy fit and demanded that he be re-anointed Labor leader, and I decided to back Jim Cairns. Jim knew that he couldn’t win, that he’d be electoral poison, but we thought we’d give Gough a kick in the bum. So I wrote a letter to all the ALP caucus above Jim’s signature, in which I said, “Whose party is this? Ours or his?” And the letter worked like a charm when we came within three votes of ending Gough’s career before it began.

Fitz: Given Gough’s subsequent greatness, were you wrong to try and block him?

PA: We didn’t want to block him, we just wanted to give him a fright, keep him honest. And we were astonished, as he was astonished, that we got so close. Gough always referred to me thereafter as “Cairns’ campaign manager”. And he literally never spoke another word to Cairns again, ever.

Adams, second from left, at the 1983 Australian Film Institute Awards in Sydney with Norman Kaye (Best Actor), Bob Hawke and Wendy Hughes (Best Actress).Credit: Ross Anthony Willis/Fairfax Media

Fitz: But hang on, when you say Gough never spoke to Jim Cairns again, Cairns was obviously in Gough’s government! He must have talked to him.

PA: [Firmly]. Gough never spoke directly to Cairns again. Amazing fact. Even when Cairns was briefly deputy prime minister, the hatred was all-enveloping, and it gave Gough and I a sort of “frenemy” thing – our friendship waxed and waned.

Fitz: Whereas your later friendship with prime minister Kevin Rudd was so deep that you left the ALP over the issue of Julia Gillard rolling him?

PA: I resigned from the ALP pretty much the day he went because Kevin was a close friend and because, as [Paul] Keating said to me the following day, “What Gillard did caused permanent damage to the office of prime minister”. And it began the era of the revolving-door prime ministerships.

Fitz: The other thing that stands out for me in looking at your career is that despite not even finishing high school, you’re the best-educated bastard in six-days march in any direction and have six honorary doctorates just for warm-ups. You must have an absolutely overwhelming intellectual curiosity.

PA: Well, yes, I’m an autodidact (Fitz: I shall look that up) and that’s the great privilege of doing Late Night Live. It’s been equivalent to a university education, and I think all those tertiary bodies for giving me those honorary gongs.

Adams (third from left) with his Commission For The Future colleagues in 1985. “We introduced the whole issue of climate change to Australia.”Credit: Fairfax Media

Fitz: But even before doing LNL, you must have already been a fierce reader.

PA: Absolutely. I believe books are the building blocks of civilisation, and they have certainly been the building blocks of my life. And, of course, I would then go on to interview literally tens of thousands of authors.

Fitz: Again, in terms of moving a long way in your journeys, you were born the son of an Englishman but became a powerful proponent of nurturing the Australian identity, making iconic Australian films like The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, Don’s Party, We of the Never Never and doing things like successfully advising prime minister John Gorton on forming the Australian Film Commission, and the Australian Film Radio and Television School, becoming chair of the National Australia Day Council and so on. As Australians go, you’re a particularly proud one.

PA: Well, I’ve been lucky to get a lot of very interesting jobs over the years, and in fact, being on the Commission for the Future was one of which I’m particularly proud because we introduced the whole issue of climate change to Australia in the early ’80s. I remember feeling absolutely confident that we’d sort that one out quickly, but here we are. And just as we’ve got a lot of very strange people called monarchists, we’ve got a huge number of people called climate change denialists.

Graham Kennedy, John Hargreaves and Ray Barrett in the 1976 Adams-produced movie, Don’s Party.Credit: Photo Library

Fitz: Many of whom are now your colleagues? Robert Manne described you – and I agree with him – as “the emblematic figurehead of the pro-left intelligentsia”. The Australian would not seem to be the natural home for the columns of one of your bent?

PA: A paradox, isn’t it? But I’ve written columns for 14 mastheads and have been in and out of The Oz over the decades – Rupert [Murdoch] sacked me on at least one occasion – but these days, I’m allowed to linger on, demonstrating pluralism and allowing me to put evil left-wing ideas into the newspaper. It thoroughly disapproves of them but – let it be said – never censors them.

Fitz: Is it fair to say that they put you up one end of the seesaw to try and demonstrate balance for the dump truck of hard-right stuff they have at the other end?

PA: [Laughing] I think so.

Fitz: All of which brings us to your longest journey of all: over three decades of Late Night Live with Phillip Adams on Radio National, an extraordinary run.

PA: Yes, Guinness Book of Records stuff, involving countless thousands of chats with the good and the great and the ghastly, always trying to sweeten the bitter pill of information with a bit of humour. And I think that’s incredibly important and has been part of the formula. I’ve got terrific, great regular guests, like Laura Tingle and Bruce Shapiro – and the smartest audience. The ABC did a survey years ago on who actually listens to Radio National, and they’ve all got university degrees up the Khyber, all better educated than you or me. I say it’s a perfect job. I can talk to anyone, anywhere, on any subject. And I shortly hand over to David Marr, knowing he will love it too, and the audience will love him.

Fitz: On the subject of audiences, I’ve often told the story of Richard Glover interviewing a university professor and leaving the microphone on mistakenly when the interview was over, whereupon Glover exulted how astonishingly smart his own audience was. I must say I feel that about my readership, and you clearly feel that about your Late Night Live audience. Purely as a waspish matter of interest, do you think the right-wing pundits have the same level of respect for the people who devour their stuff?

PA: Right-wing pundits, first of all, are entirely and absolutely humourless. Secondly, they never admit to error, no matter how appallingly they are proved wrong. They get the major events of history wrong but never admit to mistakes. And I have to say that if you put all their neurons and synapses in a large barrel, you wouldn’t fill the first two inches. And I don’t think they have the same respect for their audiences.

Fitz: When did you decide that, despite your great love of Late Night Live, you’d had enough?

PA: John Howard and I were born a fortnight apart, and we are both coming up for 85. The only thing he ever said that I agree with was he was opposed to retirement, so it was indeed my determination to die at the microphone. But the ABC office cleaners objected, and finally, enough is enough. It takes me virtually two days a week to get back and forth between my farm at Scone and Sydney, and that is too much precious time. I want to go and play with my dog and wander the paddocks. I want my final career to be as a farm labourer.

Fitz: I read a profile of you 20 or 30 years ago, which stayed with me. You were asked what you were up to, and your answer was that you had a couple of books on the boil, were shooting a documentary, had a lecture series coming up, and were writing a script – something like that, and I was just a bit stunned. You had about six projects on the boil but were very glib about it. Can we take it as given that your prodigious energies are starting to ebb a little?

PA: A little? They’ve gone down the gurgler! How old are you, incidentally?

Fitz: 62

PA: [Laughing] Oh, Christ, your testicles haven’t descended.

Fitz: Moving on! Over those 33 years, who was your favourite interview subject where you felt, “I’m just privileged to be in your presence, talking to you”?

PA: Mikhail Gorbachev. I spent a weekend with Gorby and his extraordinary translator. Gorby was like Bob Hawke – a hugger. Do you remember the way Hawke used to come up and give everyone, irrespective of gender, a bit of a hug? Gorby was like that, very physical. Anyway, we sat down to do this interview and his translator, who had been his translator forever – including with [Ronald] Reagan – was answering the questions before I had finished asking. I said to Gorby, “Let’s go outside and have a smoke, and we can leave him to do this as a solo.” But he was a terrific bloke, and I very much enjoyed the interview.

Fitz: What about regrets? You’ve had a few, but then again, probably too few to mention. Could you mention them now, anyway?

PA: The thing I most regret from over three decades of doing the show is a disgustingly soft interview I did with Henry Kissinger, who was, of course, a war criminal. It was so disgusting that Henry said it was the best interview he ever had and wanted to take me to lunch. And I’ve told the ABC that that interview is to be wiped. It is to be destroyed. It is never to emerge from the archive.

Fitz: Why were you – instead of being Dennis Lillee, steaming in from the Randwick end – Ian Redpath, bowling up lollipops from the Paddington end?

PA: He didn’t really want to do the interview. He was in New York. I was in Sydney. I had to cajole him into taking part. But then I went far too soft. And as I say, I’m deeply, deeply ashamed, and I trust you will not refer to this encounter!

Fitz: Indeed, you can trust me, Phillip ... Now, even though you’re a contractor, not an employee, you must be bound by the ABC charter. We’ve just had the whole Laura Tingle pile-on for expressing a personal view at the Sydney Writer’s Festival. There must be things that you’re bursting to say once you’re freed of the ABC strictures. Want to go early, here, in my column? You must be bursting.

PA: I’ve already come out and said them. Senator Sarah Henderson – who is no relation to Gerard – was berating the ABC CEO David Anderson in Senate estimates, saying what a deplorable human being I am, how “Adams has gone rampantly wild” and demanding that I be censured or disciplined. Poor old David Anderson had to say, “He’s only here for another week!”

Fitz: But, your legacy will endure. Bravo: you, the horse you rode in on, and the horses you now go to.

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