Listening Tour

One day in December, Kevin Rudd and I went to Queensland. Somewhere in the clouds after leaving Canberra and Melbourne, respectively, the newly elected Opposition Leader and I, in anticipation of landing, each turned back the clock. Watches and mobiles reconfigured for the absence of daylight savings time, we were both ready to land.
Rudd, with entourage, was going to Brisbane to begin his ‘listening tour’ in the state Labor must make inroads in at the next election. I, with entourage, set off by hire-car to the caravan park at Mon Repos Beach, north of Bundaberg, site of a sea turtle rookery, for a more typical tour. At 6.45 pm, according to my watch, it was getting dark. I stood surveying the place, the tents and caravans and cabins behind me, the beachside national-park ahead, irritated by Queensland recalcitrance on time, envying Rudd his Brisbane electricity.
‘Yeah, I been comin’ here forty years’, said Les, suddenly next to me. He was maybe 60, grey-haired, grey-stubbled. ‘Up from, ah, Maryborough’.
‘Yeah?…’ I said. Les stood with his arms folded staring out at the ghostly line of white waves in the blue-blackness to the east.
‘…It seems like there are a lot of places to see round here’, I said. ‘You don’t go to the Sunshine Coast or Fraser Island some years?’
‘Nah’, said Les. ‘…Nah, this place is good. Quiet. Beach for the kids. Good showers and all that’. He looked around. ‘Don’t fix what ain’t broke, y’know?’
I said, ‘We’re just up from Melbourne. Came here to see the turtles come up to the beach’.
‘Melbourne?’ Les said. ‘Ah yeah…Yeah, the kids scare ‘em off a lot of the time, the turtles, goin’ on the beach just before dark. They ban people from the beach after six o’clock, but…’
That was news to me. ‘They should really put up signs or have rangers around or something at that time. There were people all over the beach before’.
‘…Yeah’, he said, carefully and somewhat suspiciously considering my proposed change. ‘Maybe…’.
I discreetly analysed my new acquaintance. Probably his group, like mine, had left the lantern home and so couldn’t play Uno. And as he was a Queenslander, I figured I was very probably in the presence of a "Beattie-Howard voter". For ten years of elections, Queenslanders have opted for the combination of a John Howard federal government and a Peter Beattie state government.
Les, too, was watching me with an analytical gaze.
I said, ‘After this we’re gunna go down to Hervey Bay’.
‘Hervey Bay’s bloody horrible, said Les. ‘All developed. Was good once. We was there in ‘74. Wasn’t bad then,’ he said, pausing meditatively. ‘But ah, no, not anymore’.
We stood in silence, bar the rasping bush heartbeat of the crickets.
‘But this place’, said Les. ‘This place hasn’t changed. See, in the eighties they, ah, wanted to develop this whole stretch. Big complex right on the beach. Make it like Noosa. But those turtles, they can’t have artificial lights. Screws ‘em up somehow, I dunno exactly how, but, yeah, it does. So there was this huge fight, dragged on for years, and in the end they banned any sort of development, ‘cept for this caravan park, ‘cos it’s been here forever and it don’t interfere that much’.
Except that, surely, Mon Repos had changed in forty years. An hour ago I had strolled about, in the last of the light. An asphalt road that looked newly paved was bordered on one side by a sugarcane plantation, sprinklers chugging water over the green stalks. The road was dotted with flattened corpses of cane toads.
I inched Les towards the subject of politics.
‘Well, I liked Hawke until that thing with the air-traffic controllers. When he sacked the air-traffic controllers, well, that did it for me, I couldn’t vote for him again’.
I asked what he thought of Keating.
‘Keating! Him and the bloody Indonesians! Keating and Suharto were bloody buddies for Christ’s sake. The Indonesians don’t like us, don’t respect us; and Keating was just falling over himself to please ‘em. He had’ve won again we’d all be eatin’ with chopsticks’.
Whitlam?
‘Whitlam! He was just a fool. Just ploughed ahead with any change he could think of. Didn’t matter to him if it was good change or not or what else it stuffed up. And he didn’t explain half of it to his own Guvvamunt, let alone the rest of us’.
The inner-city Sydney-Melbourne perspective tends to see the Howard Government steadily eroding the painstakingly-formed mountain of progress, whether whittling away one hundred years of industrial relations safeguards through WorkChoices, or eight hundred years of the rule of law in its attitude to David Hicks. But another perspective, common in Queensland, is that it is ‘progress’ which is eroding the world as they like it.
I hoped that, down in Brisbane with his electricity, the new Labor leader, as he enjoyed drinks with Queenslanders (or, for all I know, played Uno with them), was receiving a similar serve. Les doesn’t mourn the ghosts of Labor past: one who didn’t see a need to announce his economic policy at an election prior to implementation; another who hardly bothered to explain and justify dictator-coddling to the electorate; another who crashed through with all the subtlety of the Looney Tunes Tasmanian Devil, and to hell with any collateral damage.
Too often, the ALP gives the impression of not realising, first, that not all change is inherently good, and second, that change should be articulated and explained to Maryborough. For too many, the Labor Party and its policy initiatives seem like legislative cane-toads hopping brazenly into backyards.
Howard, and also Beattie, buck the trend in the minds of many – in Les’s words, they’re ‘Alright’ – and are rewarded with the caravan park vote.
My watch said seven thirty. The sky was black, aside from pinpricks of stars. Almost time to go turtle-spotting. I said to Les, ‘What’s with this no daylight saving up here?’
Les said, ‘Mm. Yeah. Well, there have been referendums on it.’
‘Have there?’ I said.
‘Yeah. Beattie said just the other day, he reckons he’ll hold another vote on it soon’.
‘Really?’ I said.
‘Personally I think it’s a good idea’, he said.
‘Really?’ I said.
‘Well, yeah. Ya have daylight saving, ya get home from work, ya get an extra hour of light to, y’know, do the garden or whatever. Seems a good idea to me’.
‘So you’d support it if it were put to a vote?’ I asked him.
‘Well…’ he said. ‘I’d certainly consider it’.
Rudd, who is a Queenslander, even though he has taken to adjusting his watch in October and again in March, is a good candidate to perform a very necessary task, to reconcile the literal and metaphorical time difference between the states and peoples of Australia. If he achieved nothing else of consequence in government, it would in itself make him a successful Prime Minister; and it could serve as a useful platform for Rudd Labor to bring about permanent and popular-mandated change.
If he never becomes Prime Minister, Rudd will be a useful Labor leader if he makes the federal party realise that their long period in opposition is partly their own fault. Adolescent romantics aside, it is probably more sensible to ensure you will actually crash through and not simply crash. And, when skiing downhill, a full set of skis and poles are generally preferable.
Rudd may find inspiration from Les’s choice for State Parliament. Peter Beattie, member of a new generation of less tub-thumping Labor leaders at Premier’s desks, has paved the way to reconciling change-mongering with ‘relaxed and comfortable’, reconciling Les with the latte set, and maybe soon, Queensland with daylight saving.
In thongs we walked to the beach and joined the rangers, me with my tertiary-educated posse, Les with his grand-daughter. My watch and Les’s both said 10pm. It felt to me like 11, but as we all loitered and shivered on the deserted beach, awaiting prehistoric reptiles to materialise from the crashing waves, the clock’s importance faded. The wind whistled; the surf hissed; the moon was full. The hillside was pitch-black, development-free, just the way the turtles from South America, and Les from Maryborough – and I – liked it. Then, digging her flippers into the wet sand, humping awkwardly up the beach, was a green sea turtle.
The Queensland State Government has implemented a useful change at Mon Repos. A short way up the black hillside, behind the grassy sand-dunes, there is a tiny light. Without disturbing the turtles, it shows people, in the dark, the path to the caravan park. It is the light on the hill.