N.Z. man leading light in Aust, politics

Press, 10 December 1981, Page 21

N.Z. man leading light in Aust, politics

By

PAUL SOMERVILLE,

Mitchell College

of Advanced Education, Bathurst, N.S.W.

Thirty years ago an ambitious young man- slipped quietly out of New Zealand in search of, as he put it. "a wider horizon and a satisfying career.” Today, he is one of Australia's most influential politicians.

Colin James Mason, aged 54, was for three months acting leader of the Australian Democrats while the party leader. Senator Don Chipp, was recovering from a heart attack.

The Democrats have held the balance of power in Australia’s upper house, the Senate, since July this year. By voting with the Labour opposition, Mason and his 1 pur Democrat colleagues have the power to sabotage the Fraser Government’s legislative programme. "We have a very heavy responsibility,” Senator Mason says, gravely. “We hold the destinies of Australians in our hands in a very real sense.”

Colin Mason is short and well built, with iron grey hair and a sun-tanned complexion. A pair of silverrimmed' spectacles seem to hold back the bushy eyebrows that dominate the upper part of his face. He was born in the Auckland suburb of Mt Eden and spent the first 10 years of his life in the bleak coal mining town of Hikurangi, north of Whangarei. 3

The early years in Northland left a lasting impression. “Those experiences in my childhood have given me a deep sense of the need for social justice,” he says. Poverty was all too visible in Hikurangi during the Depression. “I went to school with children who never owned a pair of shoes in their lives, who wore clothes literally made out of sacks, whose lunch was a piece of bread and dripping,” he says. Child mortality was high. In his street alone a diptheria epidemic killed six children.

The townspeople were either miners or unemployed. “The mines were dangerous, they flooded daily, and accidents happened regularly,” he says. The Masons were lucky. His father worked as an engineer at the local dairy factory. “During the 1930 s Hikurangi was a very grim place. The town’s only doctor left because he couldn’t earn a living.”

In 1936, the Masons moved to Hamilton and Colin finished his secondary education at Hamilton High School. He has never returned to Hikurangi.

While at school Mason started what became his career. He began to write — this time it was children’s stories. “They were not very exhalted publications, but I was in fact selling my first

written work,” he says. After leaving school in 1945 he completed a diploma in journalism at the University of New Zealand, in Auckland and Wellington, and got a job as a trainee journalist on the New Zealand “Herald.” He began an arts degree in history and political science but never finished it.

“Now I'm getting the real political science,” he says, referring to his powerful position in the Senate. “The political science here is what is not in the books. It’s very much a power struggle place and that’s its keynote.”

One of Senator Mason’s earliest memories of political life in New Zealand was a rally at the Whangarei Showgrounds in 1936 when he was 10. The new Prime Minister, Mr Michael Savage, addressed the enormous crowd.

“It was a remarkable scene. There were people falling on their knees in front of him. People were treating him like a god,” he says. Colin Mason had no intention of taking up a political career. After leaving New Zealand in 1951 he was employed by the Sydney "Morning Herald” and the Australian Broadcasting Commission. In 1956, he became the A.B.C.’s first correspondent in Asia.

"I was based in Singapore as a roving correspondent

for South-east Asia. I think some of my material went back to New Zealand through the A.B.C. transcription service,” he says. In Asia he covered revolutions, wars, and natural disasters. It was this first-hand experience of political instability that made him believe it was necessafy to cnoose evolutionary solutions to society’s problems. “I'm quite opposed to war and revolution as a means of solving anything,” he says. “The community . has to evolve solutions to its problems. That’s what the Democrats are about.” After a stint with S.E.A.T.O. in Bangkok, as civilian adviser to the Thai government, he returned to Australia to write full-time. Until 1977 he had published nine books, among them "Dragon Army,” a popular history of Communism in Asia, and “Man in Asia,” a history of the Orient. One of his books, Hostage, sold nearly a quarter million copies. Colin Mason’s wife, Nancy, also a New Zealander, spent the time left over from rearing their three children in portrait painting, spinning, and weaving. For almost 20 years the

Masons lived in the small Blue Mountains town of Wentworth Falls, 100 kilometres west of Sydney. “I never needed to know the time or wear a tie,” he says, with a smile.

Why did he enter politics? “It was put to me very forcibly that I should be in politics; that I should play a part in a citizens’ party,” he says.

The Australian Democrats were not his first choice. “My involvement began in the Australia Party when I

stood as a Senate candidate in 1975.’\ The Australia Party had its genesis in the anti-Viet-nam war movement within the Liberal Party during the early 19705. As a political party it never polled more than five per cent of the vote in any state or federal election, nor did it win any seats. Like the Australia Party, the Democrats were another Liberal off-shoot. The party’s Ssent leader, Senator John pp, had been Minister for Customs and Excise in the McMahon Government, but Chipp was not appointed to the Fraser Ministry. In 1977, after 18 months of idleness on the Government backbench, Don Chipp resigned . from the Liberal Party to found the Australian Democrats. Among the splinter groups to merge into the new party was the Australia Party.

In the election later that year Mason was placed at the top of the Democrats’ New South Wales Senate ticket. Both he and Don Chipp, from Victoria, were elected for six-year terms. “In the first three years we didn’t really have any power. We made a lot of noise, raised issues, and introduced private member’s bills,” Mason says.

terms did not begin until July 1 this year.

“Now the situation is rather different. The Australian Democrats have the absolute discretion on what passes the Australian Parliament and what does not,” Mason says. This situation — less than four months old, because Parliament did not resume until August — is still a novelty to him. His voice carries a sense of excitement and awe.

Already he and his three Senate colleagues have sent the Fraser Government's sales tax legislation back to the House of Representatives for modification and helped initiate Senate committees of inquiry into the effects of Agent Orange and into the damming of the Franklin River in south-west Tasmania for hydro-electric-ity.

One over-worked Labour Senator complained that the Democrats had proposed 17 Senate inquiries but w.ere only prepared to serve on two of them. Criticism has also been heaped on them for their failure to reject outright the Government’s sales tax legislation.

“The Labour Party wanted us to block air the sales tax legislation, including the tax on luxuries, on machinery being brought in by multinational corporations, fur

At the federal election last year the Democrats won three more Senate seats but the new. members’ six-year

coats, gold-plated jewellery, and yachts,” Colin Mason says. "That doesn’t happen to be our policy. “If we had voted to block the sales tax legislation there could have been a double dissolution and a new election.”

The Democrats’ position in the Australian Parliament has been likened to that of the Social Credit League in New Zealand’s — both trying to entrench themselves in the political middle ground. According to Senator Mason, the Democrats and Social Credit have been in close contact for two years. “We do not have any social credit in our policy and are unlikely to, but we see them as citizens’ party eschewing the old ideas of left and right much as we do ourselves. They have policies and ideas that are in many ways similar to the Democrats.”

Mason says that the Democrats are free of ideology, although basically they support private enterprise. “We are pragmatists. Issues should be decided on the events. Once you start deciding them from an ideological position you are getting a perversion of action. The Democrats’ selfappointed role in Australian politics is to prevent the tendency towards extremism, and to try to make the Coalition and Labour parties come to a consensus.