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SPEECH BY THE HON JOHN KERIN TO THE AUSTRALIAN RURAL
LEADERSHIP FOUNDATION- CANBERRA, 15 NOVEMBER , 2013.
I was quite surprised receive your letter offering me Honorary
Fellowship status with the Foundation. Thank you for the honour, even if
unearned. My only knowledge of the Foundation now is meeting
youngish agriculturalists and those associated with our farm industries
who have benefited from your programmes. The Foundation serves a
wonderful purpose. Leadership often requires a compelling purpose.
I have always been convinced that the best agricultural and rural policy
(they are not the same thing) is education closely followed by research,
development and extension. The same is probably true for industry
policy generally. For our secondary industries to get anywhere near
global quality and scale requires knowledge- knowledge that has
siphoned out the information which is noise. Wisdom only comes with
senility.
I will offer a few views on leadership in politics and the Public Service
and in farm organisations. Leadership like politics, is about power.
‘Power’, like ‘democracy’ can be constantly re-defined. Who has power
and how it is exercised is the stuff of politics, if not resilient long term
policy solutions.
Education gives people options with respect to employment but
hopefully and more importantly, with respect to thinking. The best
farmers that I met in the time I was Primary Industry Minister (back in
the Dreamtime) were those who thought, who innovated, who displayed
creativity- a very hard quality of thinking to achieve. Some old farmers
had a lot of wisdom-wisdom gained from experience, but not all were
open to new ideas, especially in terms of structural change rather than
adoption of applicable research findings and technology. The elected
farm leaders I dealt with displayed varying degrees of leadership skills.
The best were those who did not repeat slogans and shibboleths or
simply took a Party political position. The NFF, the best of the farm
organisations, working in Canberra knew that it had to analyse policy not
just parrot known certainties or make ambit claims, though at one stage
it thought the Hawke Government should eliminate the manufacturing
sector to reduce farm costs.
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I was first elected to the Parliament in 1972, quite by accident. Today, it
would be absolutely impossible for me to even envisage gaining preselection in the Australian Labor Party. The buzz for me in politics was
that no two days were the same, yet there was a constancy in politics, if
not policy making, going back to the Ancient Greeks (with Machiavelli
and Shakespeare giving a hand). Also, that one suddenly acquired
enormous social mobility and that one had the chance to make the
situation in many areas of public policy and private enterprise better.
There is no sense in being in politics, at elected level, unless one likes
people and wants to make things better.
I have been at a small lunch for twelve with George Bush Senior, argued
with Margaret Thatcher in a meeting of the Australian Cabinet as well as
speaking with Helmut Kohl, conversed with James Baker 3 when he was
US treasury Secretary, spoken one on one with Prime Minister Mahatir
and spoken with President Suharto and many Australian and other
world leaders. I have taken on Iran’s second most important Ayatolloh in
Mashad on the plight of the Bahaii’s. I have witnessed the squalor of
colonial East Timor and the horror of war in Somalia. I have witnessed
four Australian Prime Ministers in action. But the named people I have
just referred to were leaders in a political sense. We think of leaders and
leadership, as if it is the same attribute. Who the leaders are and how
they lead are two different questions. I do not believe one can categorise
and educate people to become leaders, people can only be assisted to
develop leadership skills.
Many people and management consultants do quite well by giving
speeches and seminars and writing books on leadership. I was always of
the view that leadership was impossible to define and that attempts for
definition always had to be in a contextual setting. I believe political
leadership is different to leadership in industry, in academic circles, in
the public service, in effectively chairing the local P&C Committee. Some
so-called leaders have happened to be there at the right time. Most
people in leadership positions are more than moderately intelligent but
yet who have worked hard, as have all the exceptionally intelligent
people I have been privileged to meet. Some leaders have lacked
education. Both Paul Keating and I left school at 14. He went on to study
everything he could about politics. I tried to learn everything I could in
various disciplines and became a technocratic cum detail person. Keating
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became a different more successful kind of leader than me and I sure our
leadership skills were very different. But being poorly educated held
neither of us back. Hawke was a Rhodes Scholar, highly intelligent and a
supreme negotiator. I have observed highly educated people who have
not been judged as sound politicians.
Leadership styles vary greatly. In Politics and the Public Service, I have
observed leaders who have been bullies, who have acted on the basis of
consensus, who have tried to negotiate on the basis of reason, not
realising that people do not vote on the basis of fact or reason, but on the
basis of perception and sentiment. I have worked with Departmental
Secretaries who were not inclined to get close to their Minister, who had
one track minds or who were possessed of high acumen and acted
consensually, while guiding a body of, say, 4,500 people to come to
beneficial outcomes. I have observed Departmental Secretaries who have
been of high intellect, yet have displayed intellectual arrogance, in a
context where issues are rarely settled. The mark of the quality of a
public service is the quality of options placed before a Minister.
As a generalisation, business does not understand the vagaries of
politics. Farms are small businesses and some are becoming quite large
and the capacity to scale up and diversify is still enormous. This
attribute is often displayed by the spokespeople of farm organisations
who expect governments and Ministers to have the same bottom lines as
they do. The problem for a Minister is that one sees the whole picture
and the interrelationships in an economy and in our case, one which is so
exposed to international factors beyond any government’s control. In
politics, philosophy and ideology also comes into it.
There is no bottom line in politics otherwise we would all be agreed and
there would be no need for the infrastructure and the peopling of policy
directed organisations and agencies. If one is a leader how does one
decide between Australia’s egalitarian values and the hierarchical
realities of Australia’s elites? Can power be exercised in the service of
others or should the ‘others’ be empowered? How does one deal with a
disinterested electorate in the digital age and the phenomena of shorttermism in a globalised financial world?
Whitlam was a giant among the political leaders I have known. His
leadership was based on deep learning, high intelligence, courage and an
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abiding belief in the collective national interest. He provided great
leadership but too many of his Ministers had been in Opposition for too
long. World economic conditions did not suit his time and his flaw was
that he knew little of economics. I mis-read Fraser. I thought he was a
hardline right wing ideologue. He wasn’t, he was more a feudal monarch
who believed everyone had a set place in the scheme of things. His
perceived arrogance was because of his shyness. Neither Hawke nor
Keating could be accused of shyness. Hawke was a brilliant chair of
Cabinet and skilled negotiator. He was across every Cabinet submission,
knew when to delegate, he knew when to back off and understood
Australian 1980s society and economy as none other. He believed in
consensus. Keating was the pure or refined political leader. His
leadership was compromised by him being physically weak and drained,
yet he had a vision for 21st century Australia and his way with words was
commanding. For an un-educated man, his intellect shone through.
University education would have buggered him?
My view on the attributes of a constructive leadership style and modus
operandi is where you can take people with you by utilising learning,
experience, charisma based on intelligence, intellectual adaptation and a
capacity to get the best out of people. There are fads in leadership advice
and there are no panaceas.
I often found that if a well thought structure for performing policy was
established and good people were given the responsibility, good results
would come. Relationships within groups, if well directed, can resolve
tasks, quickly. I was always intent as Minister to give the idea to people
working in Government Departments, that they were working with me,
not for me. More formally, they were working for the Departmental
Secretary in the Australian Public Service (APS) in an apolitical context.
When governments change, the new lot rarely trust the existing APS. The
most extreme example of this was when John Howard sacked six
Secretaries for their sins in serving the past government. Abbott has only
sacked four for their sins in serving the past government. This is simply
political bullying. I was lucky because I trusted the Public Service.
Having been a public servant in the Department I was to be Minister of, I
personally knew many prominent people within it. And there was a
shared belief within the agricultural economics and relevant science
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professions on what needed to be done. Within branches and sections of
the APS, if the bosses know and understand the issues being worked on,
good results will come. If these people believe that they are meeting the
Government’s/Minister’s need for thought through options, they will
perform well. From what I hear these days, these conditions do not
prevail due to constant shuffling of positions and agendas. I was very
lucky.
I would be interested in what kind of leadership skills you obviously
impart to people attending your programmes. Organising farmers is like
herding cats. The most astute farmers and rural folk do not necessarily
become involved in agricultural politics. There is a cohort of farmers
coming through who are very smart. The biggest change since my time is
that women are coming to the fore. Women are now the largest group of
agricultural scientists and veterinary surgeons graduating from our
universities. Environmentalism and the disciplines associated with it has
enabled us to slowly embrace what we need to do with respect to natural
resource management. The leadership skill-set has to embrace a lot more
than it did in my day.
That’s good,
Thank you.