Phillip Adams (31 page)

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Corporate paedophilia:
This was a term Adams coined in 1995 to describe the abuse of children not by priests or scoutmasters but by companies wanting to turn children into customers, into economic units: a new form of child labour. Children in Victorian England were sent down coalmines or up chimneys but our children are sent into shopping malls to influence what their parents buy or to buy junk themselves. And Adams would know about this as he was an advertising agency partner for 35 years. In The Weekend Australian Magazine on November 18, 2006, he attacked the way fashion houses use barely pubescent models, bombard the very young with sex and violence and mass-market to children. ‘Bras for eight-year-olds? Guns for their little brothers? Accelerating adulthood long before the teenage years and pressure on parents from children who themselves are subject to peer pressure in school playgrounds orchestrated by executives who recognise no age of consent. We don't see what's happening all around us because it has become utterly familiar.'

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The Sydney-Melbourne divide:
When Adams moved from Melbourne to Sydney in the late 1980s, he realised Sydney didn't ‘give a stuff' about Melbourne and never even thought about it. Melbourne was where the thinking tended to be done and Sydney was the place for marketing and sales strategy. Melbourne invented the film industry in 1896, when the first Australian film was made; but Sydney has the studios. Melbourne has more writers; Sydney has the publishers. Melbourne is sober, Sydney is entrepreneurial. Sydney had creatures like John Singleton and Kerry Packer, who you could never imagine living in Melbourne. Melbourne has never had an Alan Jones; it has Derryn Hinch, ‘but he's a completely different kind of ratbag,' said Adams. Sydney has the shock jocks, the racy Daily Telegraph and the energy Melbourne lacks. The Australian Opera, the Australia Council and the newspaper and magazine head offices are all in Sydney. But the balance started to change when Jeff Kennett, who might have been born in Sydney, was Victorian premier from 1992 to '99. The Sydney-Melbourne differences have more recently balanced out a lot.

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Obscene salaries:
Adams saw Allan Moss, Macquarie Bank's ex-chief executive, at the federal government's 2020 Summit in February 2008 — the man who was paid $33,480,000 in 2006-07 and got an $80million golden handshake when he left in May 2008. Everything Moss touched was reputed to turn to gold, like the urinal when Adams followed him into the Summit toilet. Adams was worried about Moss' successor, Nicholas Moore, being paid a few million less — such humiliation! ‘To make matters worse,' Adams wrote in The Weekend Australian Magazine on June 21, 2008, ‘Nicholas doesn't seem quite as nice as Allan, who flashed his gold teeth at us at the Summit as though faintly embarrassed by the obscenity of his income. Even with his reduced income, Nick will be paid more than all 226 members of federal parliament together and nearly a hundred times more than the prime minister. In 1992, the income of a typical chief executive in Australia's top fifty companies was 27 times the average wage; by 2002, it was 98 times the average. To hell with wage restraint!'

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Talkback teaches Adams a lesson:
Driving to 2UE before broadcasting one evening in the late 1980s, Adams was shocked, then appalled, then infuriated listening to the broadcaster who preceded him that evening, Stan Zemanek. Zemanek was directing a stream of bigotry at ‘those bloody Abos'. When Adams arrived at 2UE, he physically removed Zemanek from the studio they shared and next day complained to the station management about his rabid racism. Adams wrote in The Weekend Australian Magazine on September 1, 2007, six weeks after Zemanek died of a brain tumor: ‘The management's response taught me a lesson about commercial talk radio: it thrives on bigotry. It makes much of its money out of fear and ignorance, so it wants its personalities to pour petrol rather than oil on troubled waters. Social division pays dividends, so stations turn a deaf ear to slanders of Aborigines, Asians, homosexuals, do-gooders, feminists, unionists and Muslims while laughing at broadcasting's ridiculous, sniveling regulators.' Once, when the Australian of the Year was the painter Arthur Boyd, Zemanek said on-air, ‘Who the hell's this Boyd bloke? Who's ever heard of him? What's he ever done for Australia?' Boyd had, in fact, just donated his property on the Shoalhaven River and paintings worth millions of dollars to Australia. He died in 1999.

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Searching for a cancer cure:
Adams admits he used to have the same view of Aborigines as John Gorton, who as prime minister stood on the Old Parliament House steps, looked at a demonstration by Aborigines below and commented to Adams, ‘Inoperable cancer.' Since soon after that, Adams has moved into and out of Aboriginal affairs but has never worked out what should be done, largely because Aboriginal leaders are opposed to each other. He does not accept for a moment that the abuse of women and children is any worse in Aboriginal communities than in white ones. ‘Visit your local court on so-called ‘Ladies' Day' and see a stream of white women seeking apprehended violence orders against abusive husbands,' he told me during one of our sessions in Paddington. ‘Late Night Live has done dozens of programs on Aborigines and I just don't buy the idea that they are any worse in the treatment of women and children than white people,' he claimed, although the evidence is very much against him. ‘I've gone to many Aboriginal communities and seen the problems, the glue-sniffing, the petrol-sniffing and the tragedy of children literally beating their brains out on walls. My campaign has been to intensify discussion. That's why we take the program to Aboriginal communities most years. A huge amount of the money poured into the Aboriginal situation has gone to white government servants, whose corruption is breathtaking. Drunken Aboriginal leaders are manipulated by calculating white bureaucrats. Captain James Cook arriving in Botany Bay in 1770 would be like a huge mothership from outer space landing in Centennial Park in Sydney or the Treasury Gardens in Melbourne. Glittering creatures with far superior technology would overwhelm us with their power, education and sophistication. The encounter would so psychologically shatter us that we would despair and turn to grog. I have no answers to the Aboriginal situation. Every time white people try to find answers, they muck it up. The only people who can find answers are Aboriginal people themselves,' said Adams. For a start, their leaders could spend most of their time in remote Aboriginal communities telling parents how important it is for their children to go to school every day.

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Deciding to die:
Most people won't face the fact that they will die. We don't have death insurance; we have life insurance. We don't die; we rest in peace or pass away. Adams believes we should use the awareness of mortality as an aphrodisiac for living. Death is censored in Western society. Many adults go to their graves without ever having seen a body. ‘Years ago, I was asked to do a program for See It My Way on ABC Television. I wanted to do it on death with a real corpse in the background, not an actor holding his breath. So I asked the props people to find me a stiff but it was vetoed by the management, who thought it would be in poor taste. No other generation has lived under such a cluster of Damoclean swords. We have cancer, we have nuclear war, we have ecological doom, but people don't like discussing death. Parents discuss sex with their children but few tell their children that they, and the children, will ultimately die. Until we know we are going to die and can discuss it, I don't think we can really live. But something else about agnosticism and atheism: if you know you are going to die, and if you believe that will be it, you will be the last person on earth to want to kill someone else. The great butchers of human history have been people who really believe that life is a temporary resting place on the way to heaven and that you are almost doing a pagan a favour by bashing his baby's brains out.'

Chapter Nineteen:
Best Columns — Songs of Satire and Dogs

Phillip Adams'
Age
and
Bulletin
columns from 1977 to 1983 were among his best ever. Lord Byron (1788-1824) wrote, ‘Fools are my theme, let satire be my song.' Adams' satire in those early columns certainly sang, as is shown in these extracts from his
Age
and
Bulletin
columns, reproduced in Penguin books. The columns reveal his remarkable insight and humour about humour itself, about loving, growing-up and the Royals. Some of Adams' best writing is about animals on his farm and also in this chapter he brings to life Two-Up (an orphaned kangaroo joey who adopted Adams as her mother), silly Willy (a Jack Russell with a death wish), Annie the butch bitch, and Molly, whose problem was tyres. Adams writes with considerable insight born of constant study that dogs have got humans bluffed.

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In ‘On Laughing' in
Uncensored Adams
(1981, reproduced with permission by Penguin Group Australia), Adams wrote: ‘With all due respect to the appeals mounted on behalf of the heart, the kidneys and the Salvos, please ignore them for the next ten minutes. The venture which I am officially launching this morning, my Joke Appeal, must take precedence. Humour is, believe it or not, the Latin word for wetness, which only emphasises our current drought conditions.

‘The Old Testament made just 29 references to laughter, of which 13 have to do with scorn and derision, while only two are born of joy. Aristotle said laughter was related to ugliness and debasement, Cicero linked it to deformity and Descartes stressed its links to hate. When compiling the top 40 subjects that could be relied upon to produce a chuckle, Francis Bacon put cripples at the top of the list. According to a study of the Bushmen of the Kalahari, regarded as among the most primitive people on earth (second only to the Young Liberals), ancient humour erupted when they were watching the death of a speared animal, the jitterbugging choreography of its final spasms. As late as 1961, a group of American researchers found that children between the ages of 8 and 15 laughed loudest at the mortification, discomfort and hoaxing of their fellows, while turning deaf lungs to witty remarks.

‘Scientists looked at humour from a mechanistic, behaviourist viewpoint, so that if you asked them, ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?', they'd say, ‘To produce a reflex involving the co-ordination contraction of 15 muscles in a stereotype pattern and accompanied by altered breathing.' Asked why firemen wear red braces, they'd reply, ‘So as to release an electrical stimulus acting on the main lifting muscles of the upper lip and the xygomatic major with currents of varying intensity producing everything from the faint smile to the contortions typical of explosive laughter.' And if you asked a biologist about the travelling salesman and the farmer's daughter, he'd look decidedly thin-lipped. For his calling regards laughter with suspicion in that it has no biological purpose. Indeed, biologists have called laughter ‘luxury reflex'.

‘The underlying reality of humour is, undoubtedly, absurdity. Absurdity, otherwise known as death, is the central fact of our existence. For 20 years, I've been writing about this subject above all others — it's an awareness of death that both curses and dignifies humanity, that defines us as a species. Life is brief, ephemeral, mortal. Yet our aspirations stretch into eternity. As Woody Allen has observed, death is the inspiration of every comedian, every artist. Without death, we'd be trapped in the boring, eternal vistas of paradise where, as Mark Twain suggested, laughter would be most unlikely. It's because of death that some people laugh at deformity, that intimation of doom. We laugh when a pompous man slips on a banana. That's a metaphoric comment on the nature of humanity. We're all pompous, all vain, all self-important. Yet we're all destined to slip on the banana of death. Three cheers for laughter.'

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From ‘On Loving' in
Uncensored Adams
: ‘Unless readers have very strong stomachs, they should skip this page. The contents will, I'm afraid, disgust you. But at Australia's leading newsmagazine (
The Bulletin
), we have a responsibility, a duty, to bring you the facts, to expose the soft underbelly of Australian society. A few weeks ago, the press was full of the most excruciating Valentine's Day messages. One read them with growing disbelief and rising nausea. They were so cute, so cloying, so yecch as to threaten the reader with brain damage. Things got underway innocently with endless variations of the ‘Roses are red, violets are blue' variety. They began a rapid deterioration. Consider the following message to Casanova from Spunk Bubble:

“The matinee's great on Mondays

With black fellows and bundies

But keep a straight face

As you leap around the place,

In your inside-out undies.”

‘A few inches further on, we had a ménage a trois Valentine: “Bumbola. To the spunkiest wiggles in the world, happy Valentine's Day. Bulk love, Borrie and Horrie.”

‘And what of this poignant message from what was, clearly, a wronged woman:

“Alan. If you love her, set her free.

If she comes back, she's yours.

If she doesn't, she never was.

Happy Valentine's Day.

With love. Your wife.”

‘And what about this, from a Casanova of the electric tram? “All girls. Thank you for being passengers on my tram. Thanks for sharing your East Preston-City journey with me. Thanks for being you. Tram Conductor 2903.”'