1. The Press Conference
Russell Grenning
In January last year we were reminded that press conference don’t have to be boringly
predictable.
A Polish Government prosecutor, Colonel Mikolaj Przybyl called in the media and
rambled on and on – well, nothing new there, so far – and journalists began to get a
bit restless as they do so the very considerate colonel suggested that they leave the
room and take a break.
The good Colonel, who had been banging on and on about protecting the honour of
his profession in the face of accusations, threats and all sorts of underhand
skulduggery decided to make a rather more emphatic statement that would really get
the attention of those rude cynics when they returned from their break.
He shot himself in the head.
But one journalist distracted this officer and gentleman who only succeeded in
shooting himself in the jaw. Even in Poland journalists can be bloody interfering
lowlife.
Hours later, a doctor treating Colonel Przybyl in hospital told local media they were
still trying to find the bullet that had lodged in his head. Presumably if they did find it,
it wasn’t in his brain.
When recovering in his hospital bed, he was asked by another pesky reporter how he
felt, Colonel Przybyl replied, “As if I had been shot.” For God’s sake, what else could
he say?
Americans, who like to think that they are world class at everything, might well have
made some token effort to suppress a snigger when recalling the case of Mr R Budd
Dwyer, the Treasurer of the State of Pennsylvania, who pulled a similar stunt in
January 1987.
Being an American he naturally got it right and he ended up a bloody dead mess all
over the floor. Again the media were to blame because they just weren’t paying
attention at all to his desperate pleas of innocence – he was facing fifty-five years in
jail after being convicted on conspiracy, mail fraud and racketeering charges.
He thoughtfully warned the attending throng, “Those of you who are putting your
cameras away, I think you ought to stay because we’re, we’re not finished yet.” Then
he made sure he, at least, was finished.
R Bud Dwyer had planned ahead – and I don’t mean just carrying a loaded gun – and
had given his aides three envelopes. They were his instructions for his funeral
arrangements, his organ donor card and a letter to his boss, the State Governor, asking
that his wife be appointed to the sudden vacancy. Just because you are going to top
yourself there is absolutely no need at all to be selfish and uncaring about it, is there?

2. James Horshock, the Treasurer’s Press Secretary – a prince among that often seriously
misunderstood tribe – was professional to the end admonishing reporters to “show a
little decorum”. I can only wonder just how one is supposed to act when the person
you are interviewing suicides in a spectacularly dramatic way splashing you with
blood and gore. The TV types would have had on their Sunday best too.
However brilliant and wonderful and incisive and revealing our Wayne Swan is at his
press conferences, I doubt that folks will be recalling any of them in twenty-five years
or so much less hailing them as truly innovative in structure.
I have been a journalist and I have been a press secretary and I have reasonably yet
cordially loathed the other side. It goes with the territory.
Generally press secretaries loathe and detest journalists for only concentrating on the
negative and not lapping up the marvellous news while journalists have equal venom
for press secretaries who are regarded as selling out for thirty pieces of silver.
That is not to say that there isn’t a veneer of civilised behaviour – well, more or less
anyhow.
A single bungled press conference can actually change the course of history and I’m
reminded of the media interview on November 9, 1989, by Mr Gunter Schabowski,
the spokesperson for the tottering German Democratic Republic.
He was handed a note by staff while actually being interviewed and read from it
announcing that East Germans would be allowed to cross the border. Asked when, he
replied immediately but – oh dear, oh dear – he got it wrong and badly wrong.
It wasn’t supposed to happen until the next day and the regime’s border guards who
had spent the previous twenty-eight years blasting away at anybody trying to make
the dash for West Berlin hadn’t actually been told about the new policy.
Nobody had told the official spokesman about the embargo.
Virtually within minutes, thousands and thousands of East German’s turned up at the
Wall and the bewildered guards, vastly outnumbered for once, prudently decided not
to try and machine gun the lot. The Wall came down.
Needless to say, Mr Schabowski’s career suffered an immediate downturn but I
suppose that would have happened anyway when the quaintly named German
Democratic Republic collapsed days later.

3. In more recent times, special mention should be made of the spokesman for Libya’s
Colonel Gaddafi’s regime, Moussa Ibrahim who regularly lectured journalists about
how splendidly the conflict with the rebels was going and how awful the NATO
bombing was.
When the writing was on the wall, he slipped out of town and was captured dressed as
a woman. Is it any wonder that at his final press conference he looked rather
befuddled? Defending a brutal regime is one thing but trying to decide matching
accessories for the next day’s outfit is quite another.
Say what you like about the sturdy East German spokesman but at least he didn’t slip
into a frock to mingle unobtrusively with the milling masses in a bid to escape. One
has to have some standards.
The much maligned former Queensland Premier, Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen devoted a
whole chapter of his memoirs (“Don’t You Worry About That”) to his frequently
fraught relations with the media. The chapter title, “The vexing media”, said it all
from his point of view.
More than twenty years ago and out of office, he wrote, “The behaviour of the media
in Australia is not, however, a laughing matter. The more I have had to do with the
media and media people, the more I have become convinced that the present state of
affairs cannot continue.”
Eerily, that has an echo today when the Greens talk about “the hate media” and how
they should be pulled into line. Amazing, isn’t it that Joh Bjelke-Petersen and former
Senator Bob Brown share a remarkably similar opinion. Joh loved to describe his
media conferences as “feeding the chooks.”
If the thought that Joh Bjelke-Petersen is applauding him from the grave ever occurs
to Bob Brown, it might even give him pause to think. This snippet from Joh’s book,
“..I have often wondered how long the freedom of the press can continue in its
present form. I’m sure the day is coming when the media are going to have to
recognise their responsibility if they want the rest of us to continue to recognise their
freedom” could easily slot into a Brown or, since his departure, any speech by a
Green pollie about the media today.
No doubt about it, press secretaries often get a very bad press. We can be blamed for
all sorts of things. When my former Leader, the legendary (and, by then, former)
Queensland Minister for Everything, Russ Hinze faced the Fitzgerald Inquiry, veteran
journalist Evan Whitton wrote that he “is also playing to the hilt the role of loveable
rogue – thought to have been designed for him by a clever press secretary.”
Well, I disagreed then and I disagree now with this comment although I do modestly
acknowledge, with all boyish blushes, that I was “clever”. After all, Mr Whitton was
a giant among the Fourth Estate so he couldn’t get everything wrong, could he?

4. When the World Trade Centre twin towers came crashing catastrophically down in
2001 and the world watched in horror and awe at this mass slaughter of civilians by
fanatics, a British Government press secretary Jo Moore emailed her colleagues,
“Now is a very good day to get out anything we want to bury”.
Silly lass – it’s one thing to think these things; it’s quite another to write them down
and send it out to all and sundry including very possibly, some who might not be the
closest and most intimate and trusted chums. Yes, she had to resign.
What did surprise me in my many, many years of devoted service to Ministers in
Victorian, Commonwealth and Queensland Governments is actually how little
journalists actually got to know about what went on. When I was a little Jimmy Olsen
boy reporter, I used to wonder how a famed Canberra columnist had such intimate
inside knowledge.
The theory was that he had senior government sources and all of that. Later, he
revealed that he used to drink at the watering hole frequented by Ministerial drivers
and be very generous indeed. Drivers have to stay sober; Ministers do not and were
often very garrulous on the way home.
All too often journalists cannot make up their own minds. They complain when there
are no press conferences – “What has the Minister got to hide?” and when there are
what they consider to be too many – “What the bloody hell is he/she on about now?”
When one of my Leaders faced the accusation he was hiding from the media, I
thoughtfully reminded some in the press gallery that Dr Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s
fabulously titled Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda instituted a
policy of daily media briefings either by himself or a senior lackey.
In fact, so helpful was he that he even handed out statements generally referring to the
brilliance of the Fuhrer, the international Jewish/Communist/Capitalist conspiracy and
like subjects that didn’t need the slightest light touch by a sub-editorial pen. Very,
very helpful was the good doctor.
However well-briefed politicians are by their press secretaries and others, they can
still make horrifying statements that haunt them for the rest of their lives. A bitter
Richard Nixon, defeated as Republican candidate for California Governor in 1962
announced, “You don’t have Nixon to kick around any more, because, gentlemen, this
is my last press conference.”
Shame it wasn’t really.