Phillip Adams (10 page)

Adams is a sincere person, skilled and devoted to trying to improve people's lives. He hates injustice and hates authority being used for its own sake and many
Late Night Live
programs expose injustice. For example, the programs for the week from August 2 to 6, 2010 included interviews with: a Cambodian woman whose parents were murdered by the Khmer Rouge; two people who described Indian corruption and shoddy building work in preparing New Delhi for the 2010 Commonwealth Games; ex-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd about how he was sacked; an African American who spent forty-four years in Louisiana state prisons; and three South Africans about the first democratic elections there in 1994.

In spite of the seriousness of
Late Night Live
, Adams enjoys the program and uses his sense of humour to lighten it. His character is passionately engaged. His aim is to discover ideas, to analyse them and to discuss events, trends and issues. Mark Aarons, the left-wing writer, told me, ‘Phillip is an engaged, even chaotic person, which I love about him. He appeals to a section of society that is engaged with ideas and wants to be challenged by information. He has a passion to explore ideas and to talk with people doing things beyond the headlines. Not that he is uninterested in current affairs, but he is particularly interested in the trends and what the future holds. When I was working on the original ABC Radio
Lateline
program in the 1970s, Phillip was playing an important part in developing the Australian film industry and he would appear on
Lateline
to talk about films and the need for cultural expansion.

‘It was an exciting time, with the Whitlam government putting a lot of money and effort into culture. But I didn't meet Phillip until 1989, when he had moved to Sydney and interviewed me for his late-night 2UE program about my first book,
Sanctuary! Nazi Fugitives in Australia
(Heinemann). The session was a dialogue and occasionally a monologue from Phillip.'

Being humble is a broadcasting technique, but Phillip's love of people is completely genuine. Most people I interviewed about Adams mentioned this point directly or by example.

Barry Jones, the former international quiz champion, Hawke government minister and close friend of Adams, said, ‘You can cure people of dengue fever or you can try to cure the swamps where the mosquitoes live — that's what Phillip tries to do. He wants to create an environment where people don't suffer. His primary role has not been to create policy but to encourage, goad or persuade people to take up particular issues.' Like Adams, Barry Jones has a brilliant mind but unlike Adams, he has no people skills. I waited for him outside his unattended Melbourne University office for an hour after our appointed meeting time and was about to give up when he arrived and apologised. I could tell he didn't like me, or my questions about Adams. Other people I have spoken to about Jones told me they have the same problems with him. Despite the reluctance that was seeping out of Jones like a vapour, I made the best out of meeting him because he is one of Adams' best friends.

He told me, ‘I talk to Phillip by phone and we exchange emails several times a week but we see each other only a few times a year because I live in Melbourne and he lives in Sydney.' I asked Jones his opinions of
Late Night Live
. Only an intellectual like him could give this response to such a simple question: ‘
Late Night Live
is a combination of an emotional and intellectual response to people of a particular demographic. Phillip's contribution and its consistency week after week reinforce his listeners' value systems. It is also a combination of predictability and unpredictability — if Phillip talks about a well-known person, you can predict the broad line but you might not predict the specifics that have just occurred to him. It means a lot to listeners, many of whom will say, “I'm glad I heard that because it reinforced what I believed”.'

Miranda Devine, the controversial News Ltd columnist, also said that Adams' views in his columns and radio programs are predictable. Overall she was not complimentary of him — she said he is a talented writer who is entitled to his own opinions but uses a lot of hyperbole and exaggeration, possibly because he is from a fiction-writing background in advertising and films. ‘He's preposterous but it's fabulous to have a writer like him, with talent and passion. He's like an old-style bleeding heart. He has genuine concerns but these are not rooted in reality and are based on vague notions. He's probably another bleeding heart who never really rubs shoulders with the great unwashed. His column writing can easily become stale, and it's dangerous as he's teetering on the verge of exaggeration. My bullshit detector often goes off when I read what Phillip writes. But he is fresh and energetic in his ideas.'

Miranda Devine knew me from when I published
Mediaweek.
In
The Sydney Morning Herald
(where she used to work) on December 6, 2007, she wrote about Adams: ‘Here we go again. Smug white folks have reactivated the “Sorry” debate, demanding that our new political leaders demonstrate their non-racist bona fides by apologising on behalf of the nation for the “Stolen Generation.” Phillip Adams writes in
The Australian
of “weeping with” members of the stolen generation and scorns Paddy McGuinness and co, who seem to prefer the term saved generation. Adams should go out to Brewarrina in Western NSW, where five-month-old Mundine Orcher was systematically beaten to death over four weeks by “culturally appropriate” foster carers. Harrowing would be a visit to the gravesides of any number of Aboriginal children beaten to death by their “carers” under the so-called watchful eyes of welfare workers reluctant to intervene for fear of creating another stolen ­generation.'

There is enough of the old leftie in Adams to want to change systems and the environment, without considering — as many current politicians do continually — whether the changes will gain or lose votes. He is very driven and gets through a prodigious amount of work, and that is important to him. He is a genuine person with empathy for less fortunate people and his interest in people is also genuine. On air, he talks about a lot of dreadful things happening on Earth in a way that is kindly to his audience, and he addresses his audience in an endearing way. He doesn't put people down (except a few arch enemies like the rival columnist Gerard Henderson) but adds familiarity and friendliness to an otherwise very trying world. Bob Brown, the Australian Greens leader, told me when I met him at his federal parliamentary offices in Sydney, ‘As a compere, Phillip magically lightens a meeting but doesn't distract from the discussions, so you want to keep listening instead of going home and locking yourself in a cupboard. That's a great ability. Phillip is one of the great popular philosophers and intellectuals of Australia. He leads all the others.'

Significant praise.

Another person who, like Bob Brown, is often interviewed by the news media is Philip
Nitschke
, Australia's most prominent and controversial euthanasia campaigner. He told me, ‘You never feel you are walking into a minefield with Phillip Adams. I have been interviewed by many people who don't like me, and others who try to get some response that will attract media attention, but I never feel Phillip might trap me. You feel you are talking to someone interested in what you say. That's rare among interviewers.

‘Phillip is a shining light in a bleak landscape of informed comment on contemporary social issues and he fills a unique place in broadcasting. I can't think of anyone else I want to listen to. It is rare that I'm not interested in his
Late Night Live
topics. When I switch on television current affairs, I often find I've got better things to do. I almost never think that when listening to Phillip's program. What stand out particularly are the people the program gets, and the regulars. You generate respect for what they say. Phillip has a humble approach when interviewing people who are full of themselves.'

It's probably a strategy to get the best out of people; it works and it's clever. Adams doesn't stand in their light. He enjoys what he does and sounds as much on the ball as ever, in spite of speaking a little more slowly as he has grown older. He could never just sit around. What drives him is his fantastic brain.

It is Phillip Adams' brain that amazes Professor Allan Snyder, director of the Centre for the Mind at Sydney University. Adams is a board member and the centre aims to help people harness their full creative capacity by studying what makes the mind work best. Snyder was born in the United States but is now an Australian citizen, and with typical American enthusiasm he went over the top about Adams: ‘He's an incredible, remarkable man; he has a panoramic, universal mind and can explain anything. He can put a magnifying glass on anything and make it come alive. He understands the emotions, drive and rationale behind everything in politics. And he's the quintessential psychologist — he understands people's motives and passions perfectly.' What Snyder particularly likes about Adams is that he is interested in everything. Snyder himself is interested in what makes a champion and he finds Adams good to talk to about that because he says Adams is a champion himself, one who applies his champion mindset to one field and then to another. Snyder asked me, ‘What's Phillip going to do when he grows up?'

On an enthusiasm for Phillip Adams scale of one to ten, Allan Snyder would score ten, in contrast to the News Ltd columnist and one-time Melbourne
Herald Sun
editor Piers Akerman, who scored none by telling me, ‘Phillip Adams is not current. He represents a number of left-wing people who have enough money to be able to spout extreme views that have little or no relation to ordinary Australians' concerns. What he says is fine in theory but lousy in practice. He is a theoretical socialist. His views are outmoded. He would be laughed out of any circle except the backwaters of a former Soviet satellite which had not been reached by news of socialism's collapse. He is amusing as a museum piece.' Piers Akerman's statement said more about him than about Adams.

What the English poet Alexander Pope wrote in 1711 could apply to Phillip Adams: ‘Great wits may sometimes gloriously offend and rise to faults that true critics dare not mend'.

Chapter Seven:
The Angry Old Left-winger

Phillip Adams has certainly influenced the Australian Labor Party but when I asked fellow left-wingers how much he has influenced it, for how long and in what ways, I received a wide variety of answers. He saw that Kevin Rudd could beat John Howard with policies only a few degrees to the left of Howard's (‘Howard Lite') and recommended Rudd to lead the federal Labor Party before many party members had even heard of him. Then when Rudd grew too keen on running Australia by himself and with a kitchen cabinet, his popularity both inside and outside the party crashed and he was knifed in the back and replaced by Julia Gillard. Adams became really upset and quit the party. He had never been to a party meeting anyway. It was typical of the way Adams broadly supports many Labor Party policies but sensibly remains a maverick by attacking the policies he dislikes, although he rarely supports Liberal Party policies and the few liberals he interviews on-air about politics are ‘small l' liberals. After the federal election in August 2010, he said on
Late Night Live
that he had voted Green. It was a sign of how much he — like many other left-wingers — has become fed up with the party's power-brokers and policies, or the lack of them.

Bob Hawke, who was one of Australia's most successful prime ministers (1983-91) with a great deal of help from Treasurer Paul Keating, told me at his Sydney office, ‘Phillip Adams is often a pain in the arse. Occasionally he says something that's worthwhile. With all the important things to read today, who would turn to Phillip? I'm not saying that in a nasty way. There's so much to read. I don't think he has made a significant contribution to Labor Party thinking. I was never close to him. Labor Party policies are made by the conferences, caucuses and executives. It's rare that an individual makes an impact. I'm not aware of a Phillip Adams idea taken up by the Labor Party that was not put up as soon as or earlier by other people. He has to give opinions every week and he must run out of ideas and get sick of it. That's evident in much of his writing.' I disagree with everything Hawke said about Adams except that some of his recent columns rake over old ideas looking for embers and need more fire in them.

Hawke was courteous but, aged eighty-one in 2010, seemed despondent, and was not as interested in Phillip Adams as in the fact that, in 1960, I was a junior sub-editor on the now defunct Sydney
Sun
when his wife Blanche d'Alpuget's father Lou was a senior sub-editor on the same newspaper. Adams had told me Bob would not see me, as they don't like each other, but I persisted and Hawke welcomed me with considerable lack of interest. He said, ‘I'm not a great radio listener. I never listen to Phillip on-air and rarely read his column. He is a person given to falling out with others. He and I had a falling out. I don't remember what it was about. I don't know and I don't care. Some people think he's a pompous pain in the arse, others tend to like him and others are indifferent. He's a non-event as far as I am concerned.' The spark that Bob Hawke had in office has left him as he has grown old.

In sharp contrast, Bob Brown, the Australian Greens leader with one of the most recognised faces in Australia, was brimming with vitality and praise for Adams when I interviewed him. Whatever you think of Green policies, Brown is respected and is a straight-shooter. He said, ‘Phillip's contribution to the left side of Australian politics has been enormous. His policies are now much more similar to the Australian Greens' than Labor policies. Phillip has never courted the Greens but he's become a breath of fresh air in Australian political commentary, which has become materialistic — especially in the John Howard years — and supportive of the idea that everyone down on their luck is a bludger,' said Brown. Adams' listeners would include many Greens supporters.