Lives in Cricket No 12 - Ric Charlesworth

he led a delegation – with Sinclair as his deputy – to the Soviet Union, Mongolia and Japan in September and October 1990. ‘Sharing the evening in a yurt with him in the middle of the Gobi Desert revealed the irrelevance of our political labels and the rigidity of political ideology on both sides.’ By getting to know him better he had come to appreciate ‘where he was really coming from. He was an agrarian socialist!’ The journey through the Soviet Union and Mongolia enabled Ric to ‘compare the coherence and quality of our political system with the enormous difficulties faced by the Eastern Bloc nations emerging from behind the Iron Curtain’. But belief in the ‘quality’ of the Australian system coexisted with a growing disillusionment with the way it worked. A great deal of parliamentarians’ time was devoted to ‘selling’ policies rather than deciding whether they were the best for the country. Rather than considering seriously the ‘rights and wrongs of our involvement in the [first] Gulf War … we discussed at length how much military assistance we could commit to the US coalition forces without appearing too hawkish at home or wimpish abroad.’ Most disappointing of all was ‘the widely held view that the pork barrel worked. Handouts in the months before an election were calculated to paper over failures in the previous years.’ Liberal prime minister John Howard ‘would later make this an artform,’ remarked Ric in 2009. Believing that government spent too much time and energy working out how best to follow public opinion, when it should be leading it, he thought that ‘encouraging and sponsoring informed debate and arguing cases strenuously were the stuff of real democracy’. Since arriving in Canberra he’d tried to take advantage of the ‘numerous educational opportunities available to backbenchers’, including tutorials in economics in the parliamentary library. But, aware that pursuit of the subjects and high marks that took him into medicine had left larger gaps in his education, in 1990 he enrolled in the BA course in philosophy and history at UWA. In that same year, Ric supported Paul Keating’s leadership challenge against Prime Minister Hawke. He had long regarded Keating as ‘the most charismatic and powerful’ figure in Parliament, who ‘could be utterly charming one minute and ruthlessly cutting the next.’ As chairman of the economics committee of the ALP caucus, Ric had got to know him better and appreciated him as somebody who ‘really wanted to lift Australia 1981-1993 59