BARRY O'FARRELL

THE MAKING OF BARRY O’FARRELL          (THE UNTOLD STORY PART 1)

(Tuesday Telegraph March 22^nd, 2011) By: Gemma Jones. (SPECIAL REPORT)

Barry O’Farrell is being driven through Ashcroft, two-storey housing commission blocks stretch in every direction.

As his government car heads towards the local school he stares out at the dark boxes containing government-funded home units.

Suddenly Mr O’Farrell remembers a Labour minister having a go at him across the chamber two years ago about how he knows nothing of the struggles of people in Western Sydney. He repeats the response he gave in Parliament as his car pulls up outside Ashcroft Primary School, in Sydney’s southwest, where he is due to make a health policy announcement.

You shouldn’t make assumptions about where people have lived in their lives, Mr O’Farrell said.

In the mid 1960s Barry Robert O’Farrell was a five-year-old kindergarten student from a Housing Commission estate. Years later he still remembers a blue government Kombi van cruising around the complex of grey five and 10-storey towers in North Melbourne with toys and library books.

A small Housing Commission unit was all that was offered to Kevin O’Farrell, a career army man and veteran of the British Commonwealth Occupation Forces in Japan, for his wife Mae and their three children Mick, Kerry and Barry.

They were a Labour-leaning family who took a liking to long-serving Liberal prime minister Sir Robert Menzies, Kerry O’Farrell remembers.

Money was limited to an army salary, but we didn’t go without. Mum was great at budgeting, she said.

Our home was a loving and happy place. Barry always had a passion for books and reading.

He loved cooking and helping Mum or Nan in the kitchen. He was an active little sportsperson, he would try anything, cricket, football, hockey, baseball, tennis and swimming.

Barry O’Farrell, any ‘army brat’ who spent part of his childhood in what is now called social housing – it comes as a surprise.

But there are many things you don’t know about Barry O’Farrell. And it’s something of a mystery that he hasn’t exploited his personal narrative in a way that comes naturally to most modern-day politicians. Maybe it is because there are precious few tangible reminders of those early days.

Mr O’Farrell has only a handful of photographs and records from the first 15 years of his life. So meagre is his personal record of childhood, they all fit into a black folder-sized box he keeps in his Parliament House office.

Everything else was lost on Christmas Eve, 1974, when Cyclone Tracy ripped through Darwin, taking in its path almost everything the young Barry possessed.

The family had moved to Darwin when his dad left the army. Barry was at his grandparents’ home in Melbourne on his first holiday alone, listening to news of the unfolding disaster on a transistor radio tucked under his pillow. It would be 36 hours before he would know if his family had survived.

It was the worst, scariest, event of my life and one that I thought we would not survive, Kerry O’Farrell recalled. I find it very hard to talk about. The whistling of the wind, the noise of the rain, the devastation.

I remember the sound of the double storey house across the road collapsing before midnight before the winds were at their worst. The feeling of helplessness knowing that a young couple with two children lived there and there was nothing we could do.

Brother Mick, who was in the army, had been recalled to Larrakeyah Barracks on Christmas Eve and called home at 9pm worried about his family and told them he was ‘scared stiff’ by the approaching Tracy. Kevin, Kerry and Mae sheltered in the laundry, beer cans intended for Christmas guests floated in ankle-deep water as the house roof was torn off above them.

Family friends eventually rescued them but with communication lines cut, the extended O’Farrell family in Melbourne feared the worst.

Mr O’Farrell’s grandmother was unable to tell her grandson of the catastrophe. She enlisted an uncle to break the news.

What they didn’t know was that he’d heard it all on his radio.

An uncle came in reasonably early to break the news to me and I said, ‘Oh, I know.’ They were both relieved and a bit shocked that I knew, he said.

It was a traumatic and stressful wait but one he approached with an external calmness which teachers, family, friends and now political colleagues claim to have seen.

Mr O’Farrell looks like his mother but takes much of his nature from his later father and his grandfather Bill O’Farrell, who was a country cop.

Flamboyance does not seem to be in the man’s DNA. Brother Greg McCann at Darwin’s St John’s College calls O’Farrell a ‘grey man.’

He was a quiet thinker. He would think and you wouldn’t quite know what he was thinking. He was quite an academic person in his own way, Brother McCann said.

There’s a thing in the army, they call it the grey men. When they are putting them through their paces there are people who stand out as leaders and go forth, and then the others the leaders have to keep pulling along. And then there’s the people in the middle who they don’t hear much of but they do everything and don’t make a fuss. He’s a grey man. In the army, they’re the people they’re looking for.

When Mr O’Farrell appeared in Brother McCann’s class he said he saw an overweight student and later he put that bulk to use in a new rugby union competition. He drafted him into the second row but then discovered he wasn’t a great sportsman. Barry did his best but his size was his great advantage.

In class, Mr O’Farrell showed some flair for innovation. He and other students made a single ungainly vehicle out of two 1939 Bedford bus chassis.

And that leads us to something else we didn’t know about Barry O’Farrell – an abiding respect for indigenous Australians.

Brother McCann took his students to Aboriginal towns like Daly River in the old Bedford that had survived Cyclone Tracy’s wrath better than any of the school buildings.

He also made canoes and young Barry and the students would swim in Darwin Harbour.

Barry and all the gang would all get out there and paddle around. You couldn’t do it these days because there are too many crocs, he said.

The school trips reinforced a deep respect for Aborigines.

His friends at St John’s would become some of the most inspiring indigenous political and sporting leaders of their generation. They were born to parents who were members of the Stolen Generation.

Emmenuel Rioli, brother of Richmond star Maurice Rioli who died on Christmas Day last year, remembers Mr O’Farrell telling him what he would do if he was their prime minister.

He saw a lot of our wants and needs and the fact that we weren’t given the full privileges and rights of every other Australian, you know,” he said. And the fact that it was all around him. It made him see that some things needed to be put right, he wasn’t happy with the way things were.

Emmanuel spoke to The Daily Telegraph on a brief visit to Darwin from his Melville Island home where he is a councillor and former president. Barry was always a scholar. A lot of us knew he was going places, maybe the public service, but we didn’t think he would go that far, he said of Mr O’Farrell’s political trajectory.

He doesn’t have a mean bone in his body, he didn’t get into trouble. We called him the brainy mob.

Mr O’Farrell said the brothers at St John’s taught each student a sense of equality and social justice.

He said his Aboriginal friends ‘added a whole dimension to my childhood and growing up that I will always remember.’

We would go on school excursions and you would end up in Daly River and at night you’d go out spotlighting and you’d suddenly see this big smile of pearly teeth would emerge from the darkness and they’d be hanging on to a goanna. Not to kill them but just to show it to us.

Maurice Rioli was two years above Mr O’Farrell.

He was elected to the NT Parliament in the seat of Arafura after retiring from football.

Arafura had already been occupied by a former St John’s boy and one of the first Aboriginal MP’s. He died at just 35 from kidney failure.

Another friend Vivien Kerinua, an AFL player, also died young, Emmanuel Rioli remembers.

Darwin developer and crocodile farmer Brian Hannon remains close to Mr O’Farrell.

While we were reading comics, he was reading Menzies. He was always into the political scene, even from an early age, he said.

The friends entered drama eisteddfods and even won a prize and Mr O’Farrell was head of the school’s debating club.

Asked what high jinks or good-natured fun they got up to and Mr O’Farrell’s slack of flamboyance rears again.

After thinking for several seconds Mr Hannon replied: Well, nothing springs to mind.

Mr O’Farrell can only remember getting ‘cuts’ with a leather strap for being late or talking in class.

Prior to the cyclone, Darwin had been a frontier town.

Mr O’Farrell learned to drive on a World War II army jeep at a buffalo station in Arnhem Land and the family would go on camping trips in a 1960 white Ford Falcon to what is now Kakadu. You took the dogs because if the dogs wouldn’t go in to have a swim in the creek or the billabong you knew there were crocodiles there, he said.

There’s another thing people don’t know about Barry O’Farrell – if he can lead the state. Mr O’Farrell fell into the Liberal Party almost by accident.

After school he moved to Ursula College at Australian National University where he studied politics and Aboriginal affairs and adopted unique hobbies, including breeding angel fish in an aquarium.

A nerdish side has persisted, his favourite show in recent years was Kath and Kim.

There was nothing pretentious about Barry, fellow student and current Liberal Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells said.

After university he worked at the Department of Business and Consumer Affairs but didn’t enjoy it. With rent to pay and a bar bill to manage, he took a job in South Australian Liberal senator Tony Messner’s office. He still wasn’t a member of the party, just a researcher with a keen interest in politics.

As part of his job he went to a Liberal federal conference in Hindmarsh in Adelaide.

I went to the meeting... I walked out I think a secretary of the FEC. Thanks to Tony. Tony was the bloke who said you’re here, join up and here’s the job, he said.

His next break was a job in John Howard’s office when the future prime minister became Liberal leader for the first time in the mid 1980s. It was there that he would show the first leadership, advising Mr Howard against a sacking which would haunt the party for decades.

BARRY O’FARRELL: THE UNTOLD STORY  (PART TWO)

(Wednesday Telegraph March 23^rd 2011) By: Gemma Jones. (SPECIAL REPORT)

Barry O’Farrell was ready to quit. It was the height of the Liberal Party’s leadership turnstile after John Brogden snatched the party leadership from Kerry Chikarovski in March 2002.

He had stood in Ms Chikarovski’s office and urged her to fight for her leadership – loyalty for which she remains grateful. But it came at high personal cost.

It was a political own goal and Mr O’Farrell thought he would be better off looking for another job.

I had given up any hope of being leader when John took over. I not only lost the deputy’s position I was also sacked as a shadow minister and went to the backbench, Mr O’Farrell recalled.

I had a few weeks when I considered whether I would hang around. I wasn’t on the front bench and, given the expectation of John’s success, I could easily have thought ‘I will go.’

Ultimately, even though he was unable to see a future beyond support roles, he wanted to stay on ‘to do something.’

The setback was just one of many factors that influenced the O’Farrell political narrative. Factor in, also, that there were some on his side of politics who wondered if he had the ‘ticker’ to lead.

Then there were the lessons he learned from watching the Howard-Peacock leadership war from a front-row seat. Lessons he used to end a 50-year factional war which had badly hurt the party.

His heart has also been on show, never more so than at the Kempsey bus crash where the sight of 35 dead inspired Mr O’Farrell to fight for unpopular but life-saving policies.

Put the pieces together and you start to see clues as to what makes Barry O’Farrell tick.

Looking back, no one could have predicted what would happen in a party in which leadership turmoil and factional warfare were never far from the surface.

Against his own gloomy predictions of the previous year, by 2003 Mr O’Farrell was back in the deputy leader’s chair publicly – and privately vowing loyalty to John Brogden. Mr Brogden was making headway in the polls and it looked as though the Liberals might have finally found their next premier.

Then came Mr Brogden’s spectacular exit from politics and attempted suicide, from which he has rebounded to become a respected advocate for mental healthcare.

It was a traumatic week for Liberal MPs, who looked to Mr O’Farrell to take over. Behind the scenes he worked the phones for a tilt at the position he had coveted.

But then, nothing happened. He backed Peter Debnam.

He now says he had fears he could work 24 hours a day but the factions would still not have united.

This made colleagues, including the man now certain to be deputy premier, wondering if Mr O’Farrell had the ‘ticker.’

There was the opportunity to go one better and he didn’t put his hand up, so I thought maybe he’s not ambitious or maybe he doesn’t see himself as a leader, Nationals leader Andrew Stoner said.

But then, after the last election, he did put his hand up. I thought maybe he’s got what it takes. And that view has firmed. It hasn’t been stratospheric but [then] we have seen the stratospheric ones come and go.

Before Mr O’Farrell’s rise, Mr Stoner said, his side had long regarded the dysfunctional Liberals as ‘lead in the saddlebags’ of the National Party.

In 2007, after Mr Debnam’s disastrous loss to Morris Iemma, Mr O’Farrell finally seized the top job.

Moderates and right-faction MPs had been at war since the 1960s and Mr O’Farrell decided, without any fanfare, that the cancer eating the heart of the party had to be excised.

Like some sort of secret society, he chaired meetings in a Sydney building without a sign on the door.

Inside a boardroom in the Union Club on Bent Street late on a Sunday the first meeting of what became known as ‘Barry’s round table’ was in session. In an uneasy face-off, Moderates leader Michael Photios and his entourage sat opposite right-faction chief David Clark and his allies. The chiefs had not spoken in years – that’s how poisonous the factional war had become.

Mr O’Farrell got straight to the point: We all have to find a pathway to reform – no reform is unacceptable and not an option.

He told Mr Photios and Mr Clarke they had to become ‘brand Liberal, not brand faction’ and unite behind one objective – to win government.

Fallout from reform bids would see the president, vice-president and treasurer of the party resign before Mr O’Farrell’s round table strategy finally worked.

Party stalwarts were stunned he ended the war. Not only that, he had pushed through anti-branch-stacking provisions, reduced factional power bases and rallied unanimous support for the election of party office-bearers.

It was bold and anything but risk averse, a Liberal insider said.

Barry’s venture was emblematic of everything that he’s not seen to be.

The strategy was born more than 20 years earlier in former prime minister John Howard’s office, where Mr O’Farrell was a researcher.

As he remembers it: It was the morning that a phone call by Jeff Kennett to Andrew Peacock had been revealed. Kennett said some less than complimentary things about John Howard.

This was big news and Howard invited people in to canvas views. Most people agreed he should sack Peacock. I didn’t and I said so. He didn’t appreciate my advice.

I was in the minority in the room. I just thought it would look too contrived. The Peacock-Howard wars have had an influence on me.

I lived through them in Canberra, they did great disservice to the Liberal Party, they kept it in Opposition for longer than it should have been there and there was fault on both sides.

Howard staffer Gerard Henderson, who plucked Mr O’Farrell from Liberal Senator Tony Messner’s office, said his recruit had shown good judgement.

They were difficult time: Hawke was very popular, Howard was not the Howard he became. Howard himself would say he was a much better leader the second time around, Mr Henderson recalled.

Mr Howard said Mr O’Farrell was a ‘valued, intelligent staff member’ who he predicted will make a ‘dedicated, hardworking premier.’

Colleagues say he is a listener not prone to knee-jerk reactions.

Federal Liberal leader Tony Abbott, beaten by Mr O’Farrell to the job of Liberal Party state director in 1992, reflects on that, saying he is ‘a doer and a leader – someone who consults before he decides.’

Mr Brogden said: When he became my deputy after the 2003 election he backed me all the way. Barry has always been a leader’s man.

‘He was very affected by my suicide attempt. He was very supportive then and remains so today. We often talk about how to manage the unrelenting pressure of political leadership.

Mr O’Farrell broke down on radio in September 2005, the day after following an ambulance with Mr Brogden on board to Royal North Shore Hospital.

Known for his even temperament and considered someone least likely to resort to violence, Mr O’Farrell said he would have physically attacked some journalists who pursued Brogden.

I can relive every minute. It was awful. I can start from the Sunday night before The Daily Telegraph broke the story. I can remember his departing press conference when, frankly, he displayed great patience because there were a couple of journalists that I would have punched if they’d asked me similar questions, he said.

That night, as I was about to get into bed, a phone-call came from John’s chief –of-staff to tell me that John had been missing. They had found him, they feared self-harm and an ambulance was on the way.

Mr O’Farrell’s leadership has come as no surprise to his first boss in Sydney, former transport minister Bruce Baird, father of the likely next treasurer Mike Baird.

He went looking in Canberra for the best policy adviser to take over as his chief-of-staff in the late 1980s and Mr O’Farrell was recommended.

I think he will be much stronger than people think. He has obviously had a policy of being a small target and you know he had his critics [but] he’s not a policy wimp by any stretch, Mr Baird said.

Together, Mr Baird and Mr O’Farrell would confront two of the worst bus crashes Australia has ever seen – on the Pacific Highway near Grafton and on the Mid-North Coast near Kempsey. The carnage of 35 dead in the Kempsey bus crash in 1989 devastated the pair so much that Mr Baird reflects they probably needed counselling. But the horror made them more determined that bus floors should be strengthened and seats bolted more securely to prevent passengers being crushed.

It was horrendous and made us conscious about road safety. We saw a bus in which all the seats had been catapulted up the front in the impact. The sides of the bus were ripped like a sardine can, Mr Baird said.

Mr O’Farrell recalled: I saw more bodies at Kempsey than I ever want to see in my life. And I don’t know how emergency rescue people go through disasters time and time again and cope, frankly.

The then ministry of transport and the staff in it were just superb because they gave us the best options for proceeding. They didn’t give us what they thought were the politically expedient options.

We were under attack because we were between Victoria and Queensland, those states were saying stop, wait for a national approach and Bruce and [former deputy premier] Wal Murray were saying no.

Mr O’Farrell was briefly married in his 20s. Years after that union ended, he found the love of his life in Rosemary Cowan. The couple became engaged on a holiday in France, were married in her home town Taree and have two sons Tom, 16, and Will, 11.

The Pacific Highway is important to the O’Farrell family, not just because of the bus crashes.

Rosemary’s mother was killed on the Pacific Highway, Me O’Farrell said quietly.

Labour has delighted in reminding voters that Mr O’Farrell is a Liberal leader representing the leafy North Shore. But it would be hard to find a Liberal leader with fewer silvertail credentials. While it seems nothing ruffles Rosemary O’Farrell’s friendly demeanour, the silvertail tag irritates.

He’s not, she said from the green room at the National Party launch in Dubbo where her husband is preparing to go on stage.

I don’t think either of us are. Look, we’re very privileged to live where we live, I am not denying that.

Barry growing-up in Darwin, what a great cross-section of people, and me growing up in Taree. We were talking earlier about how lucky we were going to schools in the country.

Mrs O’Farrell said her husband had an even temper. He doesn’t do a dummy split. If he’s knocked down, he will get up again.

Perhaps the best clue to his looming success is that even his political foes find him difficult to dislike. Former Labour minister and Sydney Cricket Ground Trust chairman Rodney Cavalier said he would spend election day trying to prevent Mr O’Farrell being elected.

But he offered a back-handed endorsement of a man who also won respect from former premier Bob Carr because of his love of history. Sportsmen are very good at picking phonies and sportsmen enjoy the company of O’Farrell.