Ron Boswell: A Real World Politician

National Party leader Ron Boswell’s real-world experience working in small business is too often lacking in politics and politicians today, writes IPA Senior Fellow John Roskam.

Ron Boswell’s biography Not Pretty, But Pretty Effective is a book of deep insight and wonderful stories. It is about a different time in Australian politics. Soon after being elected to the Senate in 1983, Boswell went to Richmond, a small town west of Townsville, to present at a horse racing meeting.

During the race meeting there was an announcement over the public address system that the traffic police from Townsville had a breathalyser test at the side of the racecourse. They had pulled over the mayor and taken him to the police station. Mayor Tritton demanded his one phone call, and he considered it part of his mayoral duty to use it to warn his constituents of the presence of the breathalyser on their way home. I thought at the time that this must be a bit unusual, but it must be what they do in the country.

British politician and philosopher Edmund Burke (1729–1797) would have liked reading Not Pretty, But Pretty Effective as Boswell’s politics is firmly grounded in the practical and the real world experience of real Australians. Boswell describes himself as a ‘conservative’, and in political terms, he is that, but as comes through time and time again from the pages of Not Pretty, But Pretty Effective, Boswell’s approach to politics is fundamentally different from the technocratic managerialism so many MPs from both sides of politics profess. Boswell’s first question about a policy was, ‘How will it work in practice?’ He certainly had a philosophical framework in which he operated, but his primary concern was not for the abstract theory but a measure’s practical consequences.

That is why Boswell has so little time for Canberra’s public servants. They have little experience of the world, deal in concepts and models, and know very little about what is happening in the real world. As Boswell recognises, it is not only a growing number of public servants who do not know about the real world:

The Coalition has senior members who have never held a job that wasn’t funded by the government. That leads to poorer decision-making because they have no experience of the economic drivers of the economy outside of government. They haven’t slogged away at a business, risking their own money and facing challenges that demand they be flexible, pragmatic, and innovative. Reality confounds them. Australia has to address this question.

In one of the last joint party meetings I attended, I said, ‘I am the only one in this party room who doesn’t have a degree. And I’m the only one in this party room who has ever run a business.’

We will be happier and richer overall if Parliament includes small business people, dreamers, drivers, tradesmen, battlers.

Our Parliaments will rise above mediocrity if they contain small business people who have spent sleepless nights worrying about

laying off staff or risked a second mortgage to set up a business.

Boswell was a senator for Queensland for 32 years, from 1983 to 2014, and is Australia’s sixth-longest serving senator. Burke was a member of the House Commons for 28 years. He was the 18th century equivalent of a minister for a very brief period of his career. Burke is not famous because he was Paymaster of the Forces for 11 months in 1782.

Boswell turned down numerous opportunities to be a minister, believing he had more significant influence as the leader of the National Party in the Senate, a role he had for 17 years. Boswell’s assessment of the best way to use his abilities and knowledge was correct. He is a far more significant figure in Australian politics and public policy than 80 per cent of people who have been a minister. For example, Liberal politician and minister Bert Kelly (1912–97, in office 1958–77) who was as much of a believer in free trade as Boswell is sceptical, was an MP for 19 years, the Minister for Works for a year, and Minister for the Navy for about two years. No one remembers those details of Kelly’s career or the fact he left Parliament in 1977 because he lost Liberal Party preselection to Geoffrey Giles. Kelly’s contribution to Australia was made as a backbencher. Former Labor PM Gough Whitlam (1916–2014) said of Kelly’s part in the end of protectionism: “No private member has had as much influence in changing a major policy of the major parties.”

(Australia would be so much poorer if Connor Court Publishing did not exist. It is the publisher of both Not Pretty, But Pretty Effective and Bert Kelly’s biography, The Modest Member by Hal Colebatch.)

Boswell’s life experience equipped him to become the brilliantly effective politician he was. In 1954 he left school at 14 to work as an office boy at the Queensland Insurance Company, a subsidiary of Burns Philp.

At 17, he started selling insurance, then started his own business as an agent for hardware companies and paint and paintbrush manufacturers.

Boswell recognised political reality.

Although he had always voted Liberal, his wife’s family were Country Party. In 1974, Boswell attended his first Country/National Party conference with his wife, whose father was to receive Life Membership. There Boswell met Joh Bjelke-Petersen and party president Bob Sparkes for the first time. Boswell became involved in National Party politics, got to know the Bjelke-Petersens well, and in 1983, was elected to the Senate, third on the Nationals ticket behind Flo Bjelke-Petersen, and Stan Collard. Collard, a former train driver and trade unionist, lost his preselection in 1987 because of his opposition to the Nationals’ ‘Joh for Canberra’ campaign. While initially supportive of the ‘Joh for Canberra’ push, Boswell soon recognised political reality. Boswell writes about attending a campaign breakfast with the Queensland premier a few months before the 1987 federal election.

After the breakfast I sat in my car with Joh and talked with him about his prospects for Canberra. I explained that for him to become the Prime Minister, he would have to win more seats than the Liberals. I told him that was impossible, we didn’t have the candidates or organisation around Australia, and the best he could hope for was Deputy Prime Minister in a Coalition government, and you couldn’t guarantee that. He would have to substantially increase the number of National Party seats and

help push the Liberals over the line. Joh told me that he didn’t want to be in a Coalition.

The end of ‘Joh for Canberra’ came when Bob Hawke unexpectedly called a double dissolution for July 1987 with the result as Boswell describes:

… catching Joh and Sparkes and the National Party without candidates, without structure, without money and without any prospects for success. Joh didn’t even have a seat to run for. There was just a little over a month to pull this all together. The game was finally up.

Not long after the ‘Joh for PM’ debacle, the bells tolled again for the Qld Nationals. On 18 May, at a cabinet meeting presided over by Deputy Premier Bill Gunn, the cabinet passed a minute to set up a Royal Commission into corruption in the police force. Joh was absent when the cabinet took this step in response to an ABC program which depicted Queensland as a moonlight state with prostitution and police corruption. The terms of references were later extended. The train wreck of the ‘Joh for Canberra’ campaign was followed by the Fitzgerald Inquiry which correctly found corruption in the police force. The voting public lost all confidence in the National Party.

In December 1987, after a cabinet revolt, Queensland’s premier of 19 years was replaced. At the 1989 State election, the Labor Party gained a nine per cent swing as it went from 29 to 54 seats and the Nationals from 46 to 19 seats, and more than 30 years of Country/National Party rule ended.

Throughout his book Boswell stresses some key themes. One of them is that small businesses are usually out-organised by big business. Big business’s lobbying is professional, what little lobbying is done by small business is not. Boswell regarded one of his key responsibilities as giving a voice to those businesses and organisations rarely heard in Canberra. Sometimes the problems of farmers and businesses are brought on by their own actions.

Boswell writes about the attempt of green groups to impose an accreditation system on the beef cattle and grazing industries:

I had seen the exact same manoeuvres in the fishing industry and the diabolical pain that led to, so [I warned about it]. The moment you hook up to the accreditation scheme, it’s like being on a treadmill. They make it go faster and faster, and the producer has to become more and more green or fall off … It amounted to totalitarian control over the running of cattle stations.

Some graziers fell for it though. They thought it was harmless. But I have learnt to never negotiate, never compromise with the Greens. They take their pound of vegan flesh and want more.

Boswell’s observations about some companies in the resources sector and their attitude to a carbon tax are sharp—and accurate.

Some in the mining industry had acquiesced to the carbon tax. The position they were coming from was essentially dishonest. They had conferred with their overseas brothers and worked out how to pay lip service to the idea of a carbon tax while finding loopholes and concessions that meant they never actually paid anything significant. Anything for a quiet life – just don’t take the government on. There were no fighters like we used to have in business. It was alright

for the big end of town who can get away with hiking their prices.

Boswell writes passionately about the need to get people with various experiences into parliament . His description of how the Labor Party works and what the Liberal Party is slowly becoming is correct: “Young Labor students are warehoused into a union office, placed in a faction” and then placed into Parliament.

The Liberal Party is slightly different. Young Liberals go to university to be channelled into an MP and then a Minister’s office or a government instrumentality.

Boswell foresaw the renewable energy target’s threat to our power supply.

The average lifespan of a politician in Parliament is seven-and-a-half years and, as Boswell identifies, an ever-decreasing pool of people are seeking to become MPs. In 1974, when John Howard ran for Liberal Party preselection for Bennelong, there were 23 other candidates. The preselection in the nearby seat of Bradfield held at the same time had 29 candidates.

When Phillip Ruddock recently decided he would not recontest Berowra, a seat with a 20 per cent safe margin, only three candidates came forward.

For Boswell, one way of encouraging candidates for Parliament is to provide MPs with some financial security after they leave office. But, as he acknowledges, to do anything like reinstating the old parliamentary pension scheme would be impossible in the current political climate.

What former PM Tony Abbott has said about Boswell and his career is a fitting testament to one of the country’s great parliamentarians:

Humility plus passion for what’s right, ‘as God gives us to see the right’, are not the qualities usually associated with MPs, but they’re essential for anyone in public life who wants to be both effective and respected. Along with the legendary Senator Brian Harradine, another who became father of the Senate, Boswell was one of those rare MPs whose influence derived less from office than from force of character and dint of argument.

Abbott continues:

Long before almost anyone else, he foresaw the renewable energy target’s threat to the affordability and reliability of our power supply. The pity is that his 2014 warning to the Coalition party room fell largely on deaf ears. And along the way, on the first occasion that Malcolm Turnbull wanted the Coalition to support what was a quasi-green energy policy, in the name of saving the planet and staying in tune with the zeitgeist, he was one of those who encouraged me to run for the leadership of the Liberal Party.

This article from the Winter 2024 edition of the IPA Review is written by IPA Senior Fellow John Roskam.