It was a matinee performance of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde when Paul Keating addressed the National Press Club yesterday. No, Dr Hewson was not Dr Jekyll. True to Robert Louis Stevenson’s text, Paul Keating played both parts.
The first part was the prepared speech in which Keating played the mild-mannered Dr Jekyll. In this age of the 18-second grab, it is a role the public rarely sees. He put a carefully constructed argument with little rhetoric and lots of statistics and jargon from the Treasury.
“”30 per cent marginal income tax rate if business were to enjoy the $20 billion 70 per cent of households $25,000 each would be up to $25 a week worse off $90,000, they would find themselves up to $105 a week and up to $5460.”
Then I saw Rowan Atkinson. It was just like that skit where he falls asleep in church, slumps on the pew, and falls into a kneeling position without quite falling on the floor. Meanwhile, the sermon is droning in the background and you can’t quite make out any words, but the intonation is clearly that of a sermon.
Atkinson was two tables away. His eyes glazed over.small effects on output, the current account and employment analysis of the major elements negative effect on the economy . 10.1 per cent, 10.7 per cent.
Atkinson’s pupils rolled back. Yes, he was going to slump into the cheese just as 832,000 small businessmen were “”destined to become the new tax collectors for Dr Hewson”. The laughter jolted him, and his eyes darted around to see if anyone had seen him nodding.
Keating waded into payroll tax, so Atkinson was still not saved from the cheese plate. Tables of diplomats, retired and semi-active public servants, lawyers and political groupies barely stayed tuned. The matinee was a disappointment. It was well-argued case, but they had come for a performance. there is little difference between payroll tax and a tax on the value that is added to the products by labour. The economic effects of the payroll tax .
By now even Keating was getting bored with own prepared speech, like Jekyll bored with life. So he left out a great slab of it and Atkinson was saved from the cheese-plate.
Many in the audience had never seen a full performance of Keating as Jekyll: intelligent, softly spoken and well-reasoned. They had only seen him as Hyde, and only 18-second grabs of Hyde at that.
The ABC’s Jim Middleton, presiding, then administered the potion of transmogrification: “”We now move to questions.”
Dennis Grant of Channel Seven asked about pay television.
Immediately, the Treasury jargon was gone. Reason and politeness cast aside: “”You guys have given the GST a sleigh ride for a year now. And all we get is pay television.”
Grant persisted with a question about putting the ABC in the pay-television queue.
Keating: “”This question is not encouraging me to put Channel Seven in the queue.”
Keiren McLeonard from Network Radio was given an answer because of her colour co-ordination and red hair.
This was Hyde at his worse. Keating couldn’t help himself; he was charged by the drug of questions, and loving it. He was into humiliation and insults and colourful language. He insulted another journalist’s former publication and The Australian was just “”wrong”.
Atkinson, by now, was wide awake. However, there was not to be much more. Perhaps Keating, himself, like Jekyll, could see the danger. He cut the matinee short. There was the big performance to come on the Hill.
In that performance, Jekyll doesn’t get a role; it is all Hyde. It is, alas for Keating, the side that nearly all of the people only ever see him in.
And yesterday on the Hill he relished in it, saying to Dr Hewson with easily mustered vituperation that he would not call an early election: “”because I want to do you slowly, mate.”
One wonders, as more and more questions will be administered in the lead up to the next election, whether Dr Jekyll will ever be able to reassert himself at will.