‘Ah, here’s the apostate.’ The voice was a cigarette-flavoured drawl from a slight figure with a hat tipped on his head. This, in the Bulletin office in March 1978, my first day as a journalist after six years with the Labor Council — hence the ‘apostate’. The speaker was Alan Reid, breaker of tabloid stories, most of them harmful to the Australian Labor Party, and, according to Paul Keating, an ‘infamous Labor hater’.
Labor wasn’t his only victim. John Grey Gorton, Liberal prime minister from 1968 to 1971, felt Reid had …

“Go for your life, sport.” That was my curt introduction to Alan Reid, the doyen of the Canberra press gallery. As a green young hack in the mid-1960s I’d tip-toed into the Daily Telegraph office in old Parliament House wanting to cadge some telex time to file my copy to Sydney. Reid was perched in his usual corner like a vulture in a rumpled suit, a roll-your-own durrie in his nicotine-stained fingers. It was a Saturday afternoon. All the politicians were back in their electorates, but The Red Fox …

You may be interested to know that this fine film-noir front cover photograph of ALAN (“THE RED FOX”) REID almost never saw the light of day because two influential people, who shall remain nameless, did not want to see in 2010 a photo of someone smoking a cigarette! How about that? Yet sadly, although he stopped drinking and gambling, Reid never stopped smoking, and eventually died of lung and stomach cancer.
Speaking of photos, in our biography of Alan Reid the mystery of the ALP’s Faceless Men story and photos has …

READING a biography of the controversial and legendary Australian journalist Alan Reid, it’s hard not to be nostalgic for the days when journos chain-smoked at their desks, wore hats, and got their best tips over the poker table.
Reid, who died in 1987 after covering 20 federal elections, is worthy of a book as he combined some of the best and worst aspects of political journalism. Not only was he a superb chronicler of the news, he was also a player, using his contacts to shape the events themselves.
At the beginning …

LIKE many journalists of his generation, Alan Reid ached to write a novel. He wasn’t thinking of something twee and literary, something that might be praised for its light touches and teasing ambiguities. He envisioned a roman a clef about contemporary political life, blunt and boisterous, the whiff of the abattoir strong in the nostrils, something that would get people talking and cash registers tinkling, as Frank Hardy’s Power Without Glory had done a few years earlier. It would be loaded with conspiracies. It had to be. Reid loved a …

A PHALANX of press gallery veterans is expected to turn out next week to the launch of Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt’s biography of Alan “The Red Fox” Reid. The doyen of the Canberra press gallery during the Menzies era, Reid set new boundaries in political journalism, becoming a player as much as a reporter. He organised the photo that led to Menzies coining the phrase “36 faceless men” to describe the 36 Labor delegates who dictated the party’s policies to the exclusion of party leadership in 1963. His standing …

THE Canberra press gallery was once prowled by political reporters said to be more influential than many Ministers.
The biggest scoop, by one of the most fearsome in their ranks, Alan Reid, is chronicled in a new book.
In the autumn of 1963 the major national political issue in Australia was the Labor Party’s response to the Menzies government’s new security agreement with the United States, under which a communications station to control Polaris nuclear-armed submarines was to be established at North West Cape (also known as Exmouth Gulf) in Western Australia.
The …

A BIOGRAPHY of Canberra press gallery journalist Alan “The Red Fox” Reid, by The Australian’s resident professor Ross Fitzgerald and co-author Stephen Holt will be launched by the longest serving NSW Labor premier, Bob Carr, on June 8.
The book reveals the story behind the 1963 photographs of Arthur Calwell and his deputy Gough Whitlam that so superbly illustrated the long-held idea that Labor Party policy was set not by the leadership but by the party’s unelected “faceless men”.
For those who do not know the story, in 1963 the Labor Party …

IT was ironic that Communications Minister Stephen Conroy announced the postponement of his internet filtering legislation via an adviser last week. Advice was not something he was fond of taking. Sensing a voter backlash on the legislation, which was supposed to be introduced into the parliament before the federal election, Rudd and Conroy are banking on removing it as an election issue. But will they?
If Conroy had introduced the legislation before the election, he might have risked the ire of the Greens and Electronic Frontiers Australia, but at least it …

TWO things are clear. In this year’s federal election Queensland will be the most crucial state, followed by NSW. To win seats off the ALP, let alone become prime minister, Tony Abbott will need to beat Kevin Rudd’s slick campaigning style and election techniques, most of which the Prime Minister learned in Queensland.
The issue for Abbott now is to do the in depth homework to position himself with a tactical and policy armoury to lead in to the actual campaign. He needs especially to understand how campaigns have been run …

Dr H. V. Evatt, who led the federal Australian Labor Party from 1951 to 1960, had  been a high-profile world figure during World War II and had served a term as an early president of the United Nations General Assembly.
Doc Evatt, notoriously, was a disastrous leader , the great Labor split of the 1950s occurred on his watch , but what is less known is that his political career was in difficulties even before he became leader. These difficulties arose from his failure to reconcile the competing demands of global diplomacy …