In February of that year there had been a state election with a sensational outcome: no one won. The numbers in the lower house were dramatically tied between the two major parties, leaving just one man holding the state’s political future in his hands. Former Liberal MP Peter Lewis had always been a maverick. He’d recently been vilified and expelled from his party for speaking out against Liberal Premier John Olsen over what was known as the ‘Motorola affair’. Olsen was forced to resign after being found to have misled parliament over the tendering process for the multi-million-dollar emergency services communications contract.
Lewis won his seat as an Independent MP and the man who had committed the most unspeakable act of political betrayal was delivered the chance for the ultimate revenge. It was a political irony of Shakespearian magnitude. After 24 hours of intense lobbying Lewis was wooed by the Mike Rann-led Labor Party and, on a promise of making him Speaker of the House, put them into power. It was a tumultuous period and one which began a Labor dynasty in South Australia. At the time I was hopeful that a party which traditionally had social justice as one of its central planks would look favourably on the pursuit of exposing potential miscarriages of justice. I could not have been more badly mistaken.
Mike Rann was a consummate politician. He knew what strings to pull to get the public’s attention and he balanced the numbers internally to keep the ruthless factions pacified and ensure he remained their leader. British born, Rann had come to Australia via New Zealand. He’d learnt his craft as press secretary to the iconic social reformer Don Dunstan, who was state Premier in 1967 and ’68 and then from 1970 to ’79.
After a decade in opposition and now in power by the narrowest of margins, Rann knew he had to play the right cards. His training under Dunstan, his 20-odd years in politics and his sharp mind were his best assets. Labor had always been like a plateful of C-4 at a kids’ birthday party, likely to blow themselves up at any tick of the clock. The factions were always more lethal than the opposition: in South Australia at that time the Catholic right was the dominant force.
The man who had cultivated a powerful base in the western suburbs, and was anointed by the union movement’s ‘God father’ Don Farrell – secretary of the powerful Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association, or the ‘shoppies’ union – was the ambitious Michael Atkinson. For almost a decade, from March 2002 to June 2003 then from August 2003 until March 2010, Atkinson was to help define the meaning of justice in the state. He was to be a key antagonist in the battle to have Keogh’s case return to court.
Atkinson had briefly worked as a journalist with the Advertiser before turning his full attention to politics, becoming an adviser to federal Labor MP Chris Hurford. Joining the ‘shoppies’ in 1989 was his entree to a safe western suburbs seat and an immediate place in parliament. He held a number of portfolios in the Shadow Cabinet until the Rann Government took office in 2002, at which time he became the state’s Attorney-General.
In August 2002 Bob Moles prepared what amounted to Henry Keogh’s second petition for mercy to the Governor. Added to concerns over the Coroner withholding his findings in the baby deaths inquest was the even more disturbing discovery of the non-existent thumb bruise. It took the new Attorney-General just three months to dismiss Keogh’s plea for a judicial review of the evidence.
At the end of 2002, Today Tonight journalist Rohan Wenn left Adelaide. This presented me with the task of not just producing the Keogh stories but being the face of them if we were going to continue to press for a case review. I had not given up my reporting duties when I became the producer of the program, partly because we needed all the on-air experience we had but I also loved getting out into the field. As I’ve said, everyone has an agenda. It’s not easy to be accurate or even honest about one’s own.
Growing up, I had wonderful parents. They were loving, dutiful, hard-working and community-minded. They were Anglicans, which gave authority to their belief that reaching out the hand of compassion and friendship was the true purpose of their faith. My father was an engineer and worked for the Electricity Trust of South Australia designing cooling systems for power stations. He was of that generation that truly believed in their public duty. One calculation haunted him. He believed he’d made an error when designing steam pressure flows for the large Port Augusta power station. In his retirement he recalculated over and over. He wrote to the chief engineer, even the minister, but got polite non-committal responses telling him things were in good hands. However, he never let it go. Perhaps it is from this I got my determination to try to see things through, and not accept that all was in good hands just because those who controlled the hands said so.
I had, and still have, chronic dyslexia. As a kid, I would sometimes spell my own name incorrectly and numbers and letters were a jumble to me. The frustrating thing was I knew inside I wasn’t stupid. It meant that I experienced failure from a young age. When I left school I had little behind me. I made the decision in my early twenties to take control of my destiny and rebuild my education. I overcame my learning difficulties by painstaking effort and eventually graduated from university with an honours degree. I entered the teaching profession later than most, but felt I was a better teacher for knowing failure and having fought against it. My television journalism career also came late and largely by chance. I hadn’t been someone whose course had been set for me, nor did I inherit a career or any special gifts. My experience caused me to shy away from joining in group activities and I had an instinctive distaste for being pigeonholed or labelled, and a fear of not quite fitting in.
My pathology meant I’d been instilled with a distaste for what I thought of as unearnt and therefore unworthy entitlement. It’s what has caused me to be cynical about political favours, nepotism and the rights and privileges ascribed to certain professional or social groups. I disliked rule-followers who mindlessly accepted the artificial order of things. Rules are artifice, there to serve a purpose which may change, or may simply benefit the rule-makers themselves. We need to be sceptical, we need to understand that nothing is immutable and nothing and no one is infallible. That may sound a bit pompous but it explains why, as a journalist, with a forum to influence others, I was so drawn towards stories where the conventional wisdoms, the policy-makers, the authorities, the experts, the systems and the powerful could be exposed when they failed the purposes they were appointed to serve. My interest in justice spread much wider than one case. I had always been fascinated by the operation of our legal system.